An Indian string instrument with a long neck, a round body made from a dried gourd, and metal strings that you pluck. What makes it sound the way it does is a second set of strings underneath the ones the player touches: nobody plays those, but they ring on their own when the played strings sound near them, and that is the shimmering, humming tail you hear after every note. The player sits on the floor to play it. Ravi Shankar made it famous in the West in the 1960s, and George Harrison put it on Beatles records, so for many Western listeners the sound now means "India" or "the sixties" as much as it means the instrument. A player is a sitar player, or in Indian English a sitarist. You play the sitar. The dictionary comparison to a guitar is only a rough one — the sitar is much longer, is held at a slant, and its notes bend and slide in a way a guitar's do not.