The word percussion derives from the Latin verb "percussio" to beat, strike in the musical sense, and the noun "percussus", a beating. As a noun in contemporary English, Wiktionary describes it as the collision of two bodies to produce a sound. The term is not unique to music, but has application in medicine and weaponry, as in percussion cap. However, all known uses of "percussion" appear to share a similar lineage beginning with the original Latin percussus. In a musical context then, the "percussion instruments" may have been originally coined to describe a family of musical instruments including drums, rattles, metal plates, or blocks that musicians beat or struck to produce sound.