The parent of the English word ‘gittern’ is Old French/Anglo-Norman guiterne, also recorded in various spellings and often assumed to be a derivative of Latin cithăra, ‘lyre’. Strictly speaking, this cannot be correct. In most words of the ‘guitar’ family in the Western European languages, such as Spanish guitarra, or indeed Received Pronunciation English ‘guitar’, the prominent syllable is in second position, just as it is in Greek kithára, but not as in Latin, where the prominent syllable is in initial position, thus cíthara. The word probably passed from Byzantine Greek into Arabic, where it appears as qithāra in Abu Abdallah al-Khwarizmi's Keys to the Sciences (Mafatih al-'ulum) in the late tenth century. From there, together with direct transmission from the Greek, it passed into the various romance languages through trade and travel in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The tendency for short ‘a’ before ‘r’ in an accented syllable to be raised to ‘e’ in the forms of proto Romance from which French and Catalan are derived (compare caro > Fr cher) explains the Middle French form guiterre, if it did not arise by consonantal assimilation from guiterne.

This leaves the –erne suffix in guiterne (essentially a peculiarity of French terminology, and therefore of its English derivative) unexplained. An attractive hypothesis, first mentioned in passing by the Romanist Lazăr Şăineanu in the 1920s, is that the suffix is a deliberate exoticism like the invented names for Saracen cities which appear in Old French ‘chansons de geste’ of the twelfth century, such as ‘Califern’. One might also cite the modifications of some genuine names in these same texts so that Valtierra becomes ‘Valterne’, partly on the model of Southern Mediterranean cities such as Salerno (‘Salerne’ in the ‘chansons de geste’) and Palermo (which appears as ‘Palerne’). On this interpretation, the term guiterne was a coinage, evoking the Arabo-Byzantine Mediterranean with which the instruments in question were perhaps associated, given that their name – and perhaps they themselves – had passed into Western Europe from territories where Greek and Arabic were spoken. This is evidently an explanation in which the terms ‘guitarra sarracenica’ and ‘guiterne moresche’ may have a place.