Word.ws English Dictionary

sound the drum

sound the drum verb: to knock or ring at the door of a house to determine whether it is empty, with a view to burglary if so.

Verb

sound the drum

  1. (obsolete, thieves' cant) To knock or ring at the door of a house to determine whether it is empty, with a view to burglary if so.
    • Chief Inspector Horwell had his men make house-to-house inquiries to find out if any burglar had been 'sounding the drum' in the neighbourhood.2014, Jan Bondeson, Murder Houses of London

Questions about sound the drum

What does sound the drum mean?
Sound the drum means to knock or ring at the door of a house to determine whether it is empty, with a view to burglary if so.
What part of speech is sound the drum?
Sound the drum is a verb.

Words near sound the drum in the dictionary

  1. sound table
  2. sound tables
  3. sound technician
  4. sound technicians
  5. sound the alarm
  6. sound the drum
  7. sound therapy
  8. Sound Tolls
  9. sound track
  10. sound tracks
  11. sound truck

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sound the drum (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “sound the drum.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sound_the_drum. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.