timpani: [16] Timpani was borrowed from Italian, where it is the plural of timpano ‘kettledrum’. This in turn went back via Latin tympanum ‘drum’ (source of English tympanum ‘ear-drum’ [17]) to Greek túmpanon ‘drum’, a close relative of the verb túptein ‘hit’. Part of the same word-family is timbre ‘sound-quality’ [19], whose French antecedent meant ‘bell hit with a hammer’. => timbre, tympanum
