Tablet

How to spell tablet

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tablet

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tablet mean?

1. nounA small, solid, usually disc-shaped dose of compressed medicine taken by mouth.
2. nounA portable computer with a flat touchscreen and no attached keyboard.
3. nounA flat slab of stone, clay, or wood bearing an inscription.

Tablet in a sentence

• The pharmacist advised taking one tablet with food every morning.

• He read the report on his tablet during the train journey.

• The museum displayed an ancient clay tablet covered in cuneiform script.

• She swallowed a paracetamol tablet to ease the headache.

• The children watched a film on a tablet in the back seat.

• A memorial tablet on the wall listed the names of the fallen.

Where does tablet come from?

Language of origin: French

The word came into English in the early 1300s from the Old French tablete, a diminutive form meaning 'little table' or 'small slab', which itself traces back to the Latin tabula, meaning a flat board, plank, or writing surface. In the medieval world a tablet was literally a small flat slab, often of wax, wood, or stone, used for writing or for carrying an inscription, which is why we still speak of stone tablets bearing laws. The sense of a compressed disc of medicine arose later, in the 1700s, because such doses were pressed into small flat shapes resembling those slabs. In the twenty-first century the same idea of a thin flat panel gave the name to the touchscreen tablet computer. The single 't' before 'let' is the part writers occasionally second-guess, but it simply reflects that French diminutive ending '-ette' trimmed down in English to '-et'.

How the word is built

• tablet (from Old French tablete, a diminutive of table 'slab, board')