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table

TAY-buhl · noun

LatinOld EnglishOld FrenchMiddle EnglishEnglish

Origin

From Middle English table, from Old English tabele/tabul ("board"), itself an early Germanic borrowing of Latin tabula ("tablet, board, plank, chart"). The furniture sense comes instead from Old French table, of the same Latin root.

Journey

Old English already had this Latin borrowing but used it for flat boards or tablets, not furniture — for that, speakers said bēod or bord. The piece-of-furniture meaning arrived later through Old French, eventually pushing out the old native words for it.

Related words

It's a doublet of tabula and tavla, both descending from the same Latin source word.

More words

From Old English

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