My Web of Words - 10 - Table

One of the most popular games in Lebanon is tawleh, which in French is called trictrac or jacquet, and which, these days, is known throughout the world as backgammon. Tawleh is the everyday word for 'table'; in literary Arabic, it is written as tawilah, a word that most likely comes from Latin, given its obvious similarity to tabula.

The Latin word, from which we get 'table' and various related terms in many languages, didn't always denote the four-legged piece of furniture that we know...