dinner-table

plural dinner-tables

1. archaicArchaic form of dinner table.

   The conversation was taking place at the Elliotts’ dinner-table, and Uncle Charley looked up from his carving to say: […]

   1904, Carolyn Wells, “Servants”, in Patty at Home, New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, →OCLC, page 64

   5 more examples

   That would be bad enough, God knows! but what is it to finding yourself in an infernal "fix," at a dinner-table, with a literary quintagenarian at your elbow […]

   1852, William Hamilton Maxwell, Highlands and Islands

   Travellers on the steamers of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company are wont to rail in no measured terms at the fish-paste which forms an invariable and obtrusively evident part of the cargo, yet no Burman would think a dinner complete without his modicum of nga-pee, and it is a noteworthy fact that one form of the condiment is of frequent appearance on English dinner-tables in the East, under the name of balachong, a term borrowed from the Straits Settlements, but which designates nothing more nor less than a specially prepared variety of nga-pee.

   1882, James George Scott, The Burman: His Life and Notions, Ch. xxviii: "Nga-pee"

   Isn't it horrible, mamma! One fly produces fifty-two billions of descendants in 60 days in June and July, and they go and crawl over sick people and wade through pus, and sputa, and foul matter exuding from sores, and gaum themselves with every kind of disease-germ, then they go to everybody's dinner-table and wipe themselves off on the butter […]

   c. 1908, Mark Twain, “Little Bessie”, in Mark Twain's Fables of Man, published 1972

   But whether she has a home with her parents or not, every normal woman longs for a home of her own, and a girl who resents even arranging the flowers on her mother’s dinner-table will after marriage cheerfully do quite distasteful housework in the place she calls her own.

   1908, Maud Churton Braby, “Polygamy at the polite dinner-table”, in Modern Marriage and How to Bear It

   The stink-glands of many bugs are well known to most residents in India, whether by the characteristic odour of the common Bed-bug or by the disgusting taste in one's soup caused by a "gundy” which has been attracted by the lights on the dinner-table.

   1914, Thomas Bainbrigge Fletcher, Some South Indian Insects and Other Animals of Importance Considered Especially from an Economic Point of View