tympan
/ˈtɪmpən/
tympan noun: a piece of cloth padding placed under the platen of a letterpress to distribute the pressure on the sheet being printed.
Noun
tympan (plural tympans)
- A piece of cloth padding placed under the platen of a letterpress to distribute the pressure on the sheet being printed.
- As the pressman returns the inkballs to the inkstone, the journeyman closes the frisket and tympan.2000, Richard L. Saunders, Printing in Deseret
- The stretched membrane of a drum.
- A percussion instrument consisting of a hollow cylinder with such a membrane at each end.
- A tympanum.
- The tympanum of the ear.
- But soon I grew used to these sounds, and then I understood as well as ever, that is to say fully one half of what won its way past my tympan.1953, Samuel Beckett, Watt, [Paris]: Olympia Press, →OCLC
Forms of tympan
| plural | tympans |
|---|
Origin of tympan
From Medieval Latin tympanum.
Words formed from tympan
Questions about tympan
- What does tympan mean?
- Tympan means a piece of cloth padding placed under the platen of a letterpress to distribute the pressure on the sheet being printed.
- What part of speech is tympan?
- Tympan is a noun.
- How do you pronounce tympan?
- Tympan is pronounced /ˈtɪmpən/.
- What is the plural of tympan?
- The plural of tympan is tympans.
Words near tympan in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tympan (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:
Cite this entry: “tympan.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tympan. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.