coffee-table book
- noun
- /ˈkɔːfi ˈteɪbəl bʊk/
- I have been reading the giant lavish coffee table book Kempari and the Cinema.
- published coffee-table book
- glossy coffee-table book
- lavish coffee-table book
This is the Sluts anthology coffee table book on Palestine.
- This is the Sluts anthology coffee table book on Palestine.
- It's just I'm fascinated by random old coffee table books.
- But that wasn't complete sarcasm, because I'm actually generally excited about the new Apple Book coffee table book.
- And it's essentially this compendium of the best wisdom and guests of the podcast over the course of of several years in coffee table book form.
- This is the Chanel coffee table book and I've got the large limited edition Tom Ford coffee table book.
- So yeah, I and also they're just great coffee table books as well.
- A cringe adjacent coffee table book where you tried your best to.
- All right, wrapping things up with a few coffee table books, two of them.
- When you're when you're too many coffee table books.
- Like it's just this is a coffee table book, right?
- I mean, truly, if you know, you know, you could make a coffee table book.
- My initial dream was NPR to send out the what looked like a stacked coffee table book over and over and over so they could just be stacked.
- I got the little book of Prada and the little book of Chanel and they're quite cute, like coffee table books.
Examples
-
We look at Waters's Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea, a 2008 coffee table book with full-color photography.
Academic text (2014) -
And there's a wonderful large coffee table book of Ken Adams production design.
-
It's been sold to us in coffee table book form for 50 years.
Blog text (18) -
A publisher says it's good timing to put out a coffee table book.
-
Her portfolio is built with the goal and hope of producing a coffee table book for breast cancer survivors.
Blog text (32) -
Keep clicking to see the coffee table books that we can't get enough of.
Blog text (22) -
Lastly, Niman Ranch has a beautiful coffee table book about its history and philosophy.
Blog text (14) -
Phipps flips through the pages of a large coffee table book for Selena to see.
Fiction book (2002) -
How come?" Iva Lou asks, not looking up as she flips through a new coffee-table book about travel photography.
Fiction book (2002) -
The first shelf he looked at was full of coffee-table books by famous painters.
Synonyms
A set of written or printed pages bound together with a cover
How Decorative
Surface Forms
Morphology
coffee-table + book
The meaning is directly derivable from the constituents: a 'coffee-table' is a low table for a sitting area and 'book' is a book, so a 'coffee-table book' denotes a book for display/browsing on such a table. This noun–noun compounding pattern is common and cross-linguistically transparent, so a B1 learner who knows the parts would readily infer the basic meaning (large/decorative book for display).
Etymology
Coffee-table book comes from the simple image of a large, pretty book left on a coffee table in the living room so guests can flip through it. So, the term now means 'a large, attractive book left on a table for people to look through'.