Word.ws English Dictionary

tambour

/ˈtæmbʊə(ɹ)/

tambour noun: a small shallow drum.

Noun

tambour (countable and uncountable, plural tambours)

  1. A small shallow drum.
    1. A drummer.
  2. A circular frame for embroidery.
    • Recollect Lady Teazle when I saw you first—sitting at your tambour in a pretty figured linen gown—1777, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal, II.i
  3. A rich kind of gold and silver embroidery.
  4. Silk or other material embroidered on a tambour.
  5. The capital of a Corinthian column.
  6. Synonym of drum (“cylindrical stone in the shaft of a column”).
    Synonyms:
    drum
  7. A work usually in the form of a redan, to enclose a space before a door or staircase, or at the gorge of a larger work. It is arranged like a stockade.
  8. A shallow metallic cup or drum, with a thin elastic membrane supporting a writing lever. Two or more of these are connected by a rubber tube and used to transmit and register the movements of the pulse or of any pulsating artery.
  9. In real tennis, a buttress-like obstruction in the main wall.
    • One hazard is the tambour, a buttress which juts out and causes the ball to bounce unpredictably.2019, Simon Horobin, Bagels, Bumf, and Buses, page 150
  10. A rolling top or front (as of a rolltop desk) of narrow strips of wood glued on canvas.

Verb

tambour (third-person singular simple present tambours, present participle tambouring, simple past and past participle tamboured)

  1. (ambitransitive) To embroider on a tambour (circular frame).

Synonyms of tambour

Forms of tambour

Noun
pluraltambours
Verb
third-person singular presenttambours
present participletambouring
past participletamboured
pasttamboured

Origin of tambour

Borrowed from French tambour (“drum”), from Arabic طُنْبُور (ṭunbūr), from the Middle Persian ancestor of Classical Persian تنبور (tanbūr). Doublet of tabor and tanbur. Compare Armenian տաւիղ (tawiġ), and tabla.

Words formed from tambour

Phrases with tambour

Questions about tambour

What does tambour mean?
Tambour means a small shallow drum.
What part of speech is tambour?
Tambour can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce tambour?
Tambour is pronounced /ˈtæmbʊə(ɹ)/.
What is the plural of tambour?
The plural of tambour is tambours.

Words near tambour in the dictionary

  1. tamboti
  2. tambotrika
  3. tambotrikas
  4. tambou
  5. tambouki
  6. tambour
  7. tambour lace
  8. tambour laces
  9. tamboura
  10. tambouras
  11. tamboured

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tambour (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-tambour.wav.

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