Roundtable

How to spell roundtable

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce roundtable

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does roundtable mean?

1. nounA meeting or discussion in which all participants take part on equal terms.
2. adjectiveRelating to a discussion in which participants meet as equals.

Roundtable in a sentence

• noun

  The company hosted a roundtable on workplace safety.

• adjective

  The conference closed with a roundtable session on future policy.

• noun

  Each department sent a representative to the budget roundtable.

• adjective

  Managers held a roundtable review of the quarterly results.

Where does roundtable come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This compound joins two ordinary English words, 'round' and 'table', but it carries a famous history. 'Round' descends from the Latin rotundus, meaning 'wheel-shaped' or 'circular', which reached English through Old French rond. 'Table' comes from the Latin tabula, a flat plank or board, also borrowed by way of French. The combined idea became legendary in the medieval Arthurian stories, where King Arthur's Round Table seated his knights so that no one sat at the head and all were treated as equals. From that image the term broadened by the twentieth century into the modern sense of a meeting or discussion in which everyone takes part on equal footing. Writers slip on it mainly because it sits uneasily between three forms: the open 'round table', the hyphenated 'round-table', and the closed 'roundtable' authored here.

How the word is built

• round (circular, from Latin rotundus 'wheel-shaped')
• table (a board for sitting around, from Latin tabula 'plank, board')