A virginal — usually spoken of as "a pair of virginals," or just "virginals" — is an early keyboard instrument, popular in England in the 1500s and 1600s. Picture a shallow wooden box, roughly rectangular, with a keyboard along one long side. It has no legs of its own: you put it on a table, or on your lap, or on a stand. Inside, pressing a key makes a small quill pluck a string, so the sound is a light, bright, plucking sound — closer to a harp or a guitar than to a piano, which strikes its strings with hammers. It belongs to the same family as the harpsichord and the spinet, and in old English writing the word was sometimes used loosely for any small keyboard of that kind. Queen Elizabeth I was known to play one, and composers of that time wrote whole books of pieces for it. The word behaves oddly. The plural form "virginals" is often used for one single instrument, the way English does with "a pair of scissors" or "a pair of trousers" — one object, plural name. The singular "a virginal" is also correct and is what modern museums and music books usually print. This is a museum-and-concert word. You will meet it in early music, in history, and in Shakespeare's time; you will not use it at the shops.

維吉那琴（十六、十七世紀流行的小型撥弦鍵盤樂器，形似無腳的方箱）