bongo drum
1
3.2
- noun
- /ˈbɔŋɡoʊ drʌm/
:
bongo
- Now, just follow my lead and feel the beat of the bongo drums.
- play bongo drums
Examples
-
Follow my lead and feel the beat of the bongo drums.
-
The other had a group of smiling male musicians pounding bongo drums under palm trees.
Fiction book (1996) -
Next, pass a small bongo drum around the circle so that each individual gets a chance to play something on it.
Academic text (1996) -
I was faced with it: the picture of the musicians with their thick dark hair, their billowing sleeves, their bongo drums, the palm trees.
Fiction book (1996) -
The musician kept the rhythm on the bongo drum as the crowd danced to the music.
-
She enjoyed playing the bongo drums during the music lesson with her friends.
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At the festival, several artists performed with vibrant bongo drums that echoed across the field.
Synonyms
275
1.0
A hollow cylinder with a tight skin that you hit to make a beat
11
3.5
A small hand drum usually played in pairs in Latin American music
How Big
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is a straightforward noun compound: 'bongo' names a specific small hand-played drum and 'drum' names the instrument class, so the combined meaning (a type of drum) is directly predictable from the constituents. This compositional pattern is common cross-linguistically and follows standard English naming of instrument types, so a B1 learner who knows both words would understand it.
Etymology
Bongo drum comes from Cuban music with African roots, where musicians joined two small hand drums called bongo drums and played them with their fingers and palms. So, because people saw and heard this pair of small drums played by hand, bongo drum means 'a small, hand-played drum' today.