DRUMHEAD • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Drumhead

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/drˈəmhˌɛd/ Listen

noun

Drumhead n.

The parchment or skin stretched over one end of a drum.

The top of a capstan which is pierced with sockets for levers used in turning it.

Drumhead court-martial (Mil.), a summary court-martial called to try offenses on the battlefield or the line of march, when, sometimes, a drumhead has to do service as a writing table.

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Etymology of 'Drumhead'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Drumhead" Quotes from Famous Books

... the guns were, they were silenced forever as a frightful beam of destruction stabbed relentlessly through the control room, whiffing out of existence the pilot, gunnery, and lookout panels and the men before them. The air rushed into space, and the suits of the three survivors bulged out into drumhead tightness as the pressure ...

— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith

... with his knuckles; it responded sonorously like a drumhead, the vibration shaking the charcoal from the tracings, filling the air with a fine dust. The outlines grew faint, just perceptible enough to guide him in ...

— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... laborious. By the time the expedition reached the fork, it was felt exceedingly questionable whether the MORAL of the force were sufficiently good to undertake more extended operations. A halt was called, the men refreshed with water and a bath, and it was decided at a drumhead council of war to continue the descent of the Embassy Water straight for Vailima, whither the expedition returned, in rather poor condition, and wet to the waist, about ...

— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and the next pirating along the coast mad drunk on orange beer; besides, the Tweedies were getting to talk native now, and got more the hang of what was going on around them. So they give Afiola a sort of drumhead court-martial, and bounced him unanimous, and all the pent-up deviltry of the man came out of him at one lick, like touching off a dynamite cartridge. Tweedie preached against him from the pulpit; the other chiefs, slow as they had been to move before, now ...

— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... I noticed in particular a Vogtland regiment, whose marching step was fairly orthodox, following the beat of a drummer who tried to vary the monotony of his instrument in an artistic manner by hitting the wooden frame alternately with the drumhead. The unpleasant rattling tone thus produced reminded me in ghostly fashion of the rattling of the skeletons' bones in the dance round the gallows by night which Berlioz had brought home to my imagination with such terrible realism in his performance of the last movement ...

— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

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