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timbrels

Musical Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

timbrels: Small hand-held percussion instruments, often tambourines or similar drums, used in ancient and biblical times for rhythm, dance, and celebration, evoking joy, prophecy, or festive worship.

Detailed Definition
A timbrel is an old word for a tambourine-like percussion instrument. Keats’s question about "pipes and timbrels" evokes music and ceremony in the urn’s imagined world.
Example
Example in poetry:
Keats asks, “What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?” in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; Timbrels are small hand drums or tambourines associated with dance; “Pipes and timbrels” evokes ritual, festivity, and imagined music; The archaic plural helps make Keats’s scene feel classically distant
Additional Notes
The plural "timbrels" is a specialized, somewhat archaic musical term that many readers would not know immediately.; Found in the poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats
Also Known As
drums tambourines hand-percussion rhythm instruments
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