Four "main" sizes. Three of them are siblings. The fourth is a small guitar pretending to be a ukulele.

Pick a size below to hear its open strings. The first three (soprano, concert, tenor) share the same gCEA tuning with a re-entrant high G — the strings are literally tuned to the same pitches, only the body changes. The baritone is a different instrument: DGBE, no re-entrant G. Watch what happens when you hit the C-chord button on each.

Pure synthesis — a real ukulele has the slap of fingernail on nylon, the resonance of a tiny wooden box, and the unmistakable "ringing" of the re-entrant tuning. What comes through here is the relative timbre across sizes (the soprano sounds tighter and brighter than the tenor, both of which sound completely unlike the baritone) and the chord gotcha. A dedicated ukulele tuner page is on the way.

August 23, 1879 — the day the ukulele arrived in Hawaii

Most musical instruments cannot be dated to a single day. The ukulele can. On August 23, 1879, the British immigrant ship Ravenscrag completed a 123-day voyage from the Portuguese island of Madeira and docked at Honolulu Harbor in the Kingdom of Hawaii. On board were 423 Madeiran Portuguese contract labourers and their families, recruited to work the new sugar plantations.

Three of those passengers — Manuel Nunes, Augusto Dias, and Jose do Espirito Santo — were cabinetmakers from the Madeiran capital of Funchal who happened also to be amateur musicians. They had brought with them a small four-stringed instrument called the machete de braga (a fretted gut-strung Portuguese folk instrument related to the cavaquinho) and a five-string variant called the rajão. Contemporary newspaper accounts from the Honolulu Daily Bulletin describe immigrants giving an impromptu dockside concert on the day they landed. Within weeks the three cabinetmakers had set up workshops in Honolulu making and selling local versions of the instrument.

The story is dated this precisely because Jim Tranquada and John King — author of The 'Ukulele: A History (University of Hawaii Press, 2012), the definitive academic work — were able to cross-reference passenger manifests, the Madeiran emigration registry, the Hawaii Kingdom's customs records and the surviving Honolulu press of August and September 1879. The arrival of the Ravenscrag is one of the most thoroughly documented foundation moments of any musical instrument.

"Jumping flea" — and how it became Hawaiian within a decade

The Hawaiian word ukulele means, literally, "jumping flea" — uku being the word for flea and lele for jumping or flying. Three competing theories explain how the name attached itself to the instrument, and the literature is genuinely undecided. The popular folk etymology says it described the rapid finger movement of skilled players, which looked, to Hawaiian observers, like jumping fleas. A second theory — championed by Queen Liliʻuokalani in her late writings — argued the name was actually a contraction of uku (a gift) and lele (to come), meaning "the gift that came here," referring to the gift from Madeira. The third theory points to a specific person: a small, energetic British vice-chamberlain at King Kalākaua's court named Edward William Purvis, whose Hawaiian nickname was reportedly "ʻUkulele" (jumping flea) and who was a famously good player. The instrument, this theory goes, took its name from him.

Whichever name story is right, what is certain is that King Kalākaua (1836–1891), the "Merrie Monarch" and last reigning king of Hawaii, was a decisive patron in those first few years. A composer, dancer and serious student of Hawaiian musical tradition, he commissioned Augusto Dias to build instruments for the royal court at ʻIolani Palace, integrated the ukulele into hula performances at state functions, and personally played at small gatherings.

By Kalākaua's death in 1891 — only twelve years after the Ravenscrag arrived — the ukulele was no longer a Portuguese immigrant curiosity. It had been absorbed into the Hawaiian musical canon and was already being exported to mainland America by visiting performers and tourists carrying instruments home.

The two American booms — 1915 and 1949

The ukulele first reached the American mainland in serious numbers at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. The Hawaiian Pavilion featured a daily programme of hula and ukulele music to an audience of an estimated 17 million people over the run of the fair, and the demand for instruments that followed kicked off a decade of mainstream popularity. By the early 1920s every American sheet music publisher was printing ukulele chord diagrams above the piano staves. Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards was selling millions of records. Mainland manufacturers — Martin, Harmony, Gibson — were producing ukuleles by the tens of thousands. The first American ukulele boom essentially co-existed with the Jazz Age and faded with it.

The second boom was a manufacturing accident. In 1949 the Italian-American luthier Mario Maccaferri — who had already invented the gypsy-jazz guitar that bears his name — partnered with the television presenter Arthur Godfrey to make a plastic-bodied ukulele cheap enough to be a household toy. The Maccaferri Islander sold for $5.95 (around $80 today) and was made by the millions. Godfrey played one on his CBS television and radio shows daily. Industry estimates put total Maccaferri ukulele sales between 1949 and 1969 at approximately nine million units, making it briefly the best-selling instrument of any kind in history. Almost every American suburban household owned one. They were also, mostly, terrible — but the cultural footprint was enormous.

The third boom — Iz in 1993, Jake in 2006

By the 1970s the ukulele had retreated again. It survived in Hawaii — never went anywhere — but on the mainland it was filed under "novelty," still associated with George Formby and the Maccaferri craze.

At 3 am one morning in 1988, in a Honolulu recording studio, the Hawaiian vocalist Israel Kamakawiwoʻole — known universally as Iz — recorded a single take of a medley of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," accompanying himself on a tenor ukulele. The session is documented as having taken roughly twenty minutes. The track sat in the can for five years before being released on his album Facing Future (1993), which became the first album by a Hawaiian artist to be certified platinum. After Iz's death in 1997 at age 38 the recording escaped Hawaii: it appeared in Finding Forrester (2000), 50 First Dates (2004), Glee, dozens of other films and TV series, and has since accumulated several billion streams. It is, by any measure, the most-heard ukulele recording of the modern era.

The other turning-point recording was visual. In April 2006 a fan filmed the Hawaiian-born ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro in Central Park playing a solo tenor-ukulele arrangement of George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Within months the clip — uploaded to a YouTube that was itself barely a year old — had passed several million views. Shimabukuro's technical command of the instrument changed what serious musicians thought it was capable of: classical and jazz programmers started booking him, and within a few years he was playing the White House and the Royal Albert Hall. Combined with Iz's emotional shorthand and the rise of YouTube tutorial culture, the post-2006 ukulele boom has now lasted twenty years and shows no sign of fading — the modern American ukulele industry is larger than at any point since the Maccaferri era.

The 10 ukulele types in working use

The four main sizes are everywhere. The other six are specialist instruments — but all ten are currently in production from at least one major manufacturer.

Beyond these ten, a handful of further variants exist on the margins: harp ukuleles (added unfretted bass strings), 5-string tenors (an extra high A), pineapple-shaped sopranos (oval body, same tuning), and electric solid-body ukuleles. None are mainstream enough to be counted as separate types.

Why the baritone is barely a ukulele

The four "main" sizes are usually presented as a tidy progression: small (soprano) → medium (concert) → larger (tenor) → largest (baritone). The presentation hides the most important detail. The soprano, concert and tenor are the same instrument at three different body sizes: identical gCEA tuning, identical chord shapes, identical re-entrant high G ringing through every strum. The only difference among the three is timbre and sustain. A chord learned on a soprano works without modification on a tenor.

The baritone breaks the family. Tuned DGBE instead of gCEA, with no re-entrant high G — its 4th string really is the lowest — the baritone is, functionally, the top four strings of a standard guitar. Guitarists often choose a baritone ukulele as a portable instrument precisely because their existing guitar chord shapes (with the bottom two strings removed) transfer over directly. For a beginner who learned on a soprano, picking up a baritone is closer to picking up a guitar than picking up another ukulele. The C-chord fingering "0003" — the first chord most ukulele players ever learn — produces a G major chord on a baritone, not a C. The widget above is built around demonstrating this in two seconds.

The six players who shaped what the ukulele means

One Hawaiian king, two American radio-and-television stars who drove household booms, one British music-hall comedian, and two modern Hawaiians whose recordings made the instrument global again. Tap a card to expand.

Choosing a size — practical guide

For a first ukulele, the concert is the size most teachers now recommend. It is large enough that adult fingers fit comfortably between the frets (sopranos can feel cramped), small enough to keep the bright Hawaiian timbre, and the same gCEA tuning as the soprano means every YouTube tutorial in the world applies. Concerts typically cost about the same as sopranos at any given quality level.

Choose a soprano for the most traditional bright "Hawaiian" sound and the lowest price point, or for a child. Choose a tenor if you have very large hands, want the warmest tone of the standard three sizes, or plan to play fingerstyle arrangements (Jake Shimabukuro's signature size). Choose a baritone only if you already play guitar — otherwise you are buying a small guitar tuned to a guitar tuning and calling it a ukulele, which will close off rather than open up the standard ukulele songbook. Choose a banjolele if you want to play George Formby songs or be heard over a noisy room. Choose anything else only after you know the answer to the four main sizes question.

Adjacent terms

"Jumping flea" — the literal Hawaiian translation of ukulele. See the etymology section above for the three competing theories about why the instrument got the name.

Banjolele / banjo-ukulele — listed as type number 8 above. A banjo body with a ukulele neck and gCEA tuning. The instrument associated with George Formby.

Guitarlele / guitalele — type number 9 above. A 6-string instrument the size of a ukulele, tuned ADGCEA (a fourth above guitar standard). Despite the name and form factor, it is closer to a small guitar than to a ukulele.

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