English Words in Action, Group T +

1. Buy file dividers with alphabetical tabs (short strip, flap).
2. Our host picked up the tab (bill) for dinner.
3. What's the tab (price, cost) for these shoes?

1. Set the (dining room) table with the good china dishes.
2. A clock radio was on the table (stand) by the bed.
3. The country squire had a big house and a bountiful table (spread of food).
4. The math book contained a multiplication table (chart).
5. Find chapter three in the book by looking in the table (list) of contents.
6. The committee tabled (postponed) the proposal until a later meeting.

"Table" comes from Latin tabula, "board, writing tablet, picture".

From tabula, other words; such as, "tablet" (writing pad) and "tableau" (vivid or graphic description) have become a part of English.

"Tablet" picked up the additional sense of "flat pill" in Elizabethan times. From Tabloid, approximately a 100-year-old trademark for a tablet of condensed medications, we inherited the word "tabloid", a newspaper of small format giving the news in condensed form, usually with illustrated, often sensational material; so called, because of its condensed publication format.

1. Each student should have pencils and a tablet (writing pad) with lined paper.
2. The statue had a bronze tablet (thin metal plaque) listing the town's war heroes.
3. Take two aspirin tablets (small flat pellets of medication), go to bed and you will get relief from your pain and fever.

Tablets' tale of Russia's nuclear victims

The tablets were simple, and understated, so much so that some residents and many regular visitors had never noticed them.

The top tablet bore the alpha-beta-gamma symbol of radiation. The bottom one said: "To the victims of radioactive catastrophes, their courage and devotion to duty."

The tablets are among 40 or so memorials across Russia that commemorate not only Chernobyl, but also earlier disasters, or nuclear tests, that were kept secret for decades; near Chelyabinsk in 1957, at Semipalatinsk in 1949, and all who died or suffered by joining the hundreds of thousands of people who were drafted or who volunteered to clean up and encase the reactor or the "liquidation" of the Chernobyl accident, as the Soviet authorities called it.

1. Eating pork is strictly taboo (forbidden) among certain religious groups.
2. The Polynesians have a taboo (religious ban) about mentioning certain sacred rites.

"Taboo" is from Tongan, the Polynesian language of the Tonga Islands, southeast of Fiji, where it means "sacred".

Suburban populations are often transitory (not lasting).