Meaning

noun a slender double-reed instrument; a woodwind with a conical bore and a double-reed mouthpiece

originAn 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 3.0