tympanum

Noun

tympanum (plural tympanums or tympana)

1. (archaic) A drum.
2. The eardrum (tympanic membrane, membrana tympanica).
   • When he came around, the star sound was gone. The ringing it left in his tympana was a great confusion.2020 [1992], Vernor Vinge, chapter 2, in A Fire Upon the Deep, 1st edition, New York: Tor Essentials, →ISBN, page 33
3. The main portion of the middle ear: the tympanic cavity (cavitas tympani).
4. A thin tense membrane covering the hearing organ on the leg or body of some insects, sometimes adapted (as in cicadas) for producing sound.
5. A membranous resonator in a sound-producing organ in frogs and toads.
6. (in certain birds) The labyrinth at the bottom of the windpipe.
7. A vertical recessed triangular space between the sides of a pediment, typically decorated.
   1. The recessed triangular space within an arch, and above a lintel or a subordinate arch, spanning the opening below the arch.
      • It was a black-and-white picture of a Romanesque doorway, with flanking saints and a lively Last Judgement in the tympanum […].2004, Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty […], London: Picador, →ISBN
8. A drum-shaped wheel with spirally curved partitions by which water is raised to the axis when the wheel revolves with the lower part of the circumference submerged; used for raising water, as for irrigation.