To force an idea on someone by means of persistent repetition. This expression, used since the early nineteenth century, alludes to performing drumbeats over and over. John Stuart Mill used it in his Political Economy (1848): “This doctrine has been . . . tolerably effectively drummed into the public mind.”

To gather, to summon. Alluding to summoning recruits by beating a drum, this term has been used figuratively since the 1600s. It is often used in a business sense, as it was by Thomas Gray in a letter of 1849: “I will then drum up subscribers for Fendler.” An antonym is to drum out, meaning to dismiss or oust. In the military this, too, was signaled by beating a drum. This came to mean being fired from a job but is not heard as often today.

Close-fitting and taut. The analogy is to the skin of the drumhead, which is tightly stretched so that when it is struck the drum sounds as it should. This term was transferred in the nineteenth century to anything stretched taut; Thomas Hughes (Tom Brown’s School Days, 1857) described his hero as having eaten so much that “his little skin is as tight as a drum.” In succeeding years, however, the analogy itself was sometimes to a drum-shaped container for liquids, such as an oil drum, which of course must be well sealed to prevent leakage. Hence the expression “tight as a drum” also became synonymous with “watertight,” as in “The shelter they rigged up was as tight as a drum.”