(military) the beating of a drum as a signal for lowering the flag at sundown

Usage examples of drumbeat.

Between the rattled passages of drumbeats there was a pause filled by hundreds of voices.

There was something curiously menacing in the repetitive drumbeats that seemed to come from nowhere.

For the rest of the day the Welshmen worked glumly on the structures of their fortress, watched in vain for any reappearance of the natives, and after sunset began to be haunted again by the monotonous drumbeats from down the river.

People yipped and cheered all the dancing and pageantry around the Sacred Canoe, and Sweetgrass Smoke knew from every change in the drumbeats and voices just what was happening at any moment, because she had lived through more First Man festivals than anybody.

After an hour of tramping through the pitch-black forest to locate the source of the intermittent drumbeats they heard, they had decided on another course of action.

Most especially not now, when the dwarf clans were at war, their drumbeats throbbing late at night and the smoke from burned-out burrows hanging in the air.

Blaring brass against a background of drumbeats, an attempt to make dreadfully trite melody sound important.

Suddenly her thumping heart, throbbing chest pains, and the panicked footsteps overhead all melded into one giant drumbeat that pummeled her brain.

One of the Rasoumovsky quartets played in the background, rising eloquently above the drumbeats of the rain: as we soared high, Beethoven gave us a mystic noise, a second cellist unaccountably seeming to join the group, even an oboe at odd moments, a transcendental bassoon below the strings.

Eleanora lay in a spell, trapped by the symbolism of the animistic rite as the drumbeats increased and the singing shifted through patterns of atonality.

He could hear harping in it and fiddle, the hollow drumbeat of a crowdy crawn and a breathy flute.

A few leaders using drumbeating and patriotic rhetoric to convince the masses of things no sensible person would otherwise approve of.

The hoops of outposts, sta tions, guard ships, patrols, and bureaucratic drumbeating they'd had to jump through had left Stiles with a headache that was still here days and days later.

Muskets crackling incessantly, the drumbeats thumping, the case shots banging overhead, and beneath all that violence was the sound of men crying in distress.

My feeble but regular drumbeats may well have been welcome to the ecstatically displaced persons who were sitting or lying about the room.