Page "Guitar" Paragraph 5

The modern word guitar, and its antecedents, have been applied to a wide variety of cordophones since ancient times and as such is the cause of confusion.

The English word guitar, the German, and the French were adopted from the Spanish, which comes from the Andalusian Arabic, itself derived from the Latin, which in turn came from the Ancient Greek, and is thought to ultimately trace back to the Old Persian language Tar, which means string in Persian.