The story
- Italian · derived fromoboè
- English todayoboe
An earlier form in English is hautboy, but the spelling oboe was adopted into English ca. 1770 from the Italian oboè, a transliteration in that language's orthography of the 17th-century pronunciation of the French word hautbois, a compound word made of haut (“high, loud, high-pitched”) and bois (“wood, woodwind”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.