S(h)amisen.

In my ongoing Kurosawa retrospective, I’ve reached 1954 and Seven Samurai, which I’ve seen more often than any other of his (it’s one of my favorite movies, and of course whenever I read DeWitt’s great novel I have to rewatch it). I’ve been following along with the excellent commentaries (two different tracks, one with five film scholars!) on the Criterion set, and at one point there’s a reference to the “shamisen player.” I’ve run across that form before, but I think of the instrument as a samisen, and I finally got irritated enough to investigate. My memory that it used to be known as samisen turns out to be correct; the OED (entry from 1909) has only that form even in Japanese (“Etymon: Japanese samisen”), and Webster’s Third (1961) uses the headword samisen, adding “also samsien […] or shamisen.” (I was unaware of the form samsien, and Google Books finds only 19th-century uses.) But here in the 21st century, Wikipedia has it under Shamisen, starting the article “The shamisen or…