# Arco (Italian, "bow")

Source: https://arcosounds.com/glossary/arco

**Arco is the instruction to play with the bow, and it appears in string parts to cancel a previous pizzicato marking.**

Because bowing is the default state of a string instrument, arco is never written at the start of a piece, it only appears as a cancellation. A composer writes pizz. to ask for plucking, and arco to say "bow again". Seeing arco in a part is therefore always a signal to look back and find where the pizzicato began.

The word is Italian for bow, and it is the reason the whole family is sometimes described as the arco strings. In orchestral parts the switch is often marked several beats early, because turning the bow from a plucking position back to the string takes real time, a detail that catches out students who only rehearse the notes.

Canonical source: https://arcosounds.com/glossary/arco