dinner table
- noun
- /ˈdɪnər ˈteɪbəl/
- 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.
- It wasn't just the adorable one sitting around the dinner table saying wise things.
- But here I was at the dinner table eating dinner and drinking hot coffee.
- that we used to share to our children around the dinner table.
- My idea of rich is never looking, looking at the bill when the dinner table is being set.
- Producers now will bring the foods in and you sit at the dinner table and they will sit themselves around you.
- And we were just talking about this last night at the dinner table and I said to them, what do you guys think about?
- So things they would say to one another over the dinner table they write down and they put in letters that we can read.
- All of the importance of the role we're trying to fill suddenly gets shifted over to this person sitting across the dinner table from us.
- And like I say, I my momentum is my motion and passion is to get people to talk about energy at the dinner table.
- Together we can make our beds, our dinner tables, and our families the safe and peaceful Oasis they should be.
- And yes, the, the, the whatever the dinner table conversation was at your house about politics is or, or religion.
Examples
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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.
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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?
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"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.
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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
A table in a dining room where people eat meals
A table for people to sit around and eat meals together
How Big
Surface Forms
Morphology
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.