Taiko is written as "太鼓" in Japanese. If you cannot read these characters, go to the second link below, where the fourth and fifth characters read "taiko". The first character of "太鼓" refers to "thick", "heavy", or "big", and the second character refers to "tsuzumi", a type of Japanese drum. So, as you found in the English article, this literally means "big drum". For the resources of Japanese taiko drum, go to the following links:

"taiko" is a percussion instrument. You hit it with sticks called "bachi," so "drum" would be the best translation. There seems to be many different kinds of taiko. Some are big, but some can be small too. The reason why it was explained as "big drum" might come from that fact that the word "taiko" is made up of two Chinese characters, "tai" and "ko" and the literal meaning of "tai" is "big." The other character "ko" can be read as "tsutsumi" and that is also a percussion instrument. However, "tsutsumi" is hit by hand, not with sticks. So I think the original meaning of "taiko" is a "tsutsumi" hit with sticks, not necessarily "big drum".
Hope this helps.


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Note added at 1 hr 23 mins (2004-05-04 23:55:26 GMT)
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\"Tsutsumi\" is a particular kind of traditional drums hit by hand. Not all hand played drums are called \"tsutsumi.\"

If someone were to ask me, "Do you like taiko?", I would think of the music -- not the drum. I like taiko very much, but have rarely seen a taiko performance with only a single drum. Almost always there are smaller drums, and many times other musical instruments, such as a Japanese flute. Morever, taiko come in different sizes. Furthermore, the drums are often played in an artistic manner that includes a certain element of dance, and it is not uncommon to hear a kind of rhythmic shouting in accompaniment to the drumming.

Hitting the rim of a drum is hardly unique to taiko, I have seen both Korean and North American drummers strike the rims of their drums, as a way to obtain special sound effects.

In fact, the name of a famous Japanese taiko group is Kodou (鼓童) -- notice the absence of the word futoi (太) which means fat or great.

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Note added at 3 hrs 3 mins (2004-05-05 01:35:22 GMT)
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Finally, given any percussion set the largest drum in the set will always be the one called o-daiko (???). Please note that the t-sound changes to a d-sound, when the honorific word o (?) is placed before it. In most other cases taiko is pronounced with a t-sound.

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Note added at 3 hrs 5 mins (2004-05-05 01:37:45 GMT)
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太鼓 = taiko
お = o
お太鼓 = odaiko