- 1手鼓、通鼓；爵士鼓組裡的中鼓也叫 tom（tom-tom）
A tom-tom is a drum you hit with your hands rather than with sticks — tall, narrow, and open or covered at the bottom. The word came into English from India, copying the sound the drum makes, and for a long time English writers used it for any hand drum played in Asia or Africa, which is loose and a bit careless of them. In modern music the word has narrowed and moved: on a drum kit, the toms or tom-toms are the middle drums mounted above and beside the snare, and those ones are played with sticks. So a drummer today and an old adventure novel mean rather different objects by the same word. Because of that history, you should know that using tom-tom for someone's traditional drum can sound dated or ; the real instrument usually has its own name. In everyday speech the form tom is normal among musicians: 'hit the floor tom.'
tom-tom 指的是一種用手拍打、不用鼓棒的鼓，外形高而窄，底部可以封住，也可以開放。這個字從印度傳入英文，原本是模仿鼓聲來的。英文作者很長一段時間用它稱呼亞洲或非洲各地的任何手鼓，這種用法很隨便，也不夠精準。
到了現代音樂，這個字的意思縮小了，位置也換了。在爵士鼓組裡，tom 或 tom-tom 指的是放在小鼓上方和旁邊的中鼓，而且要用鼓棒敲。今天的鼓手和老式冒險小說用同一個字，指的卻是不太一樣的東西。音樂人在日常說話時通常直接說 tom，例如「hit the floor tom」。
因為這段歷史，把別人傳統的鼓叫作 tom-tom，聽起來可能過時，或帶有輕視的意味；真正的樂器通常有它自己的名字。
From the word’s history
Borrowed from Hindi ṭamṭam 'the sound of a drum' and kin; onomatopoeic reduplication.
借自印地語等南亞語言，是模仿鼓聲的疊字。
組成從印地語 टमटम (ṭamṭam) 借來，本身是模仿鼓聲的擬聲詞，重複兩次剛好像敲兩下。
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
tom-tomnoun
- 1
A small drum, often one of a joined pair, beaten with the hands, frequently associated with tribal cultures.
- [T]he Rattle Rale had got information that a party was coming from Badula to look for Hadje, three days before, and had assembled the Country by beat of tom tom, and that those who had conducted Hadje to the stranger had that morning returned: he spoke of the stranger as a 'Deyo' (a God).
- The passage would have been agreeable enough but for the dreadful "tom-toms," or wooden drums, which are beaten incessantly while the men are rowing. Two men were engaged constantly at them, making a fearful din the whole voyage.
- 2
Any cylindrical drum, with no snare; part of a drum kit.
tom-tomverb
- 1
To play the tom-toms.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
- tam-tam
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。