From Middle English, from Old French tabour, from Arabic طُنْبُور (ṭunbūr), ultimately from the Middle Persian ancestor of Classical Persian تنبور (tanbūr). Doublet of tambour and tanbur.
Meanings
A small drum.
A small drum. ▸ In traditional music, a small drum played with a single stick, leaving the player's other hand free to play a melody on a three-holed pipe.
Being apprized of our approach, the whole neighbourhood came out to meet their minister, drest in their finest cloaths, and preceded by a pipe and tabor […] 1766, Oliver Goldsmith, chapter 4, in The Vicar of Wakefield:
From Middle English, from Old French tabour, from Arabic طُنْبُور (ṭunbūr), ultimately from the Middle Persian ancestor of Classical Persian تنبور (tanbūr). Doublet of tambour and tanbur.
From various Slavic languages, from a Turkic language. Compare Ottoman Turkish طابور (tabur).
Meanings
A military train of men and wagons; an encampment of such resources.
A Polish-Lithuanian tabor besieged by twenty or thirty thousand Tartars must have closely resembled the overland wagon trains of American pioneers attacked by the Sioux or the Cherokee. 2011, Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms, Penguin, published 2012, page 269: