alto
AL-toh · noun
ItalianEnglish
Origin
Alto comes from Italian alto, meaning "high." It's a doublet of the English word old, meaning the two words trace back to a shared ancestor despite looking nothing alike now.
This is Curio: one word's origin story, every morning. No feed, no backlog.
One short email each morning. Free; stop anytime. See a sample →
Journey
Alto arrived from Italian carrying its sense of "high" straight into musical use in English.
Related words
Alto and old are doublets, two words descended from the same root that took different paths into English.