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dinner table

dinner table

45 1.0
A table where people eat dinner and other meals
  • noun
  • /ˈdɪnər ˈteɪbəl/
translation icon : mesa de comedor
  • Every night, my family sits at the dinner table and shares stories about our day.
  • a family dinner table

It wasn't just the adorable one sitting around the dinner table saying wise things.

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Examples

  • All the guests are sitting at the dinner table, eating soup.

    Fiction book (1992)
  • OK, so you are sitting at the dinner table with your partner and your children.

  • But here I was at the dinner table eating dinner and drinking hot coffee.

  • And we were just talking about this last night at the dinner table and I said to them, what do you guys think about?

  • "You look tired," she said to him across the dinner table that night.

    Fiction book (1996)
  • I got up from the dinner table that night and left the house.

    Fiction book (1990)
  • Tonight I'll be sitting across the dinner table from my wife, Helen, and we'll be talking about our sons, Henry and Paul.

  • Arguments at the dinner table are quickly settled by a few seconds of Google searching.

    Academic text (2015)
  • From conversations at the dinner table, I gathered she had been seeing old high school friends.

    Fiction book (1995)
  • We've had lots of fun at the dinner table kicking around ideas.

    Fiction book (1992)

Synonyms

dining-room table
vsdinner table
23 1.0

A table in a dining room where people eat meals

is used for meals anywhere not limited to a specific room
dining table
vsdinner table
12 1.0

A table for people to sit around and eat meals together

is used for serving meals without stressing shared seating

How Big

dinner table
45 1.0
kitchen table
74 1.0

Surface Forms

dinner table singular
dinner tables plural

Morphology

dinner + table

The meaning 'a table where dinner is served' is directly and transparently composed from 'dinner' (the meal) + 'table' (a piece of furniture); the noun–noun combination denotes a purpose/location and follows a common, predictable pattern in English. This construction is cross-linguistically frequent (e.g., Spanish 'mesa de comedor', French 'table à manger'), so a B1 learner who knows both words will readily understand it.

Etymology

Dinner table comes from the simple image of a table set for the main meal, 'dinner', where family and friends sit together. That's why it means the table where dinner is served and the place people gather to eat.