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dinner table

dinner table

55 1.0
A table where people eat dinner and other meals
  • noun
  • /ˈdɪnər ˈteɪbəl/
: 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 table
vsdinner table
45 1.0

A table for people to sit around and eat meals together

is used for serving meals without stressing shared seating
dining-room table
vsdinner table
31 1.0

A table in a dining room where people eat meals

is used for meals anywhere not limited to a specific room

How Big

dinner table
55 1.0
kitchen table
78 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.