Other forms: tables
A table is the flat piece of furniture with legs that you eat and work at. A kitchen table, sit at the table, clear the table.
It also means information arranged in rows and columns: a table of results, the league table, a timetable. As a verb, table means opposite things across the Atlantic: in Britain, to table a motion is to put it forward for discussion, and in America it is to postpone it — which has caused real confusion in international meetings. Note turn the tables, meaning to reverse a position of advantage.
1nountableFlat furniture with legs, used for eating and working.~86%
“The table has been in that kitchen since about 1954.”
2nouninformationInformation arranged in rows and columns.~14%
“The table at the end of the report compares the prices of five different phones.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
table is furniture or an arrangement.
Latin tabula meant a board, plank or writing tablet. The furniture and the table of figures are the same word, because both began as something written or served on a flat board.
Middle English
table
English, today
table
Built from
From Middle English table. Middle English table, tabel, tabil, tabul, from Old English tabele, tabul, tablu, tabule, tabula (“board”); also as tæfl, tæfel, an early gem - borrowing of Latin tabula (“tablet, board, plank, chart”). The sense of “piece of furniture” is from Old French table, of same Latin origin; Old English used bēod or bord instead for this meaning: see board. a doublet of tabula and tavla.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA