celesta
/səˈlɛstə/noun
celesta is a noun meaning “A musical instrument consisting principally of a set of graduated steel plates struck with hammers that are activated by a keyboard” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled C-E-L-E-S-T-A and has 3 syllables, and it appears about once in every 22 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data, counting Celesta, the name). The plural of celesta is celestas.
What does celesta mean?
noun
- 1
A musical instrument consisting principally of a set of graduated steel plates struck with hammers that are activated by a keyboard.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce celesta?
- US /səˈlɛstə/
Celesta has 3 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-celesta.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of celesta
- celestas plural
- celeste
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is celesta?
Celesta appears about once in every 22 million words in written English, the 141,699th most frequent word form in the list. The list counts every capitalisation together, so this includes Celesta, the name.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Celesta in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense musical instrument:
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does celesta come from?
Borrowed from French célesta.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).