Timetable

How to spell timetable

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce timetable

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does timetable mean?

1. nounA chart or list showing the planned times at which events, classes, or transport services happen.
2. verbTo arrange or schedule something for a particular time.

Timetable in a sentence

• noun

  The train timetable shows departures every fifteen minutes during rush hour.

• verb

  The office tried to timetable every meeting for the morning to keep afternoons free.

• noun

  She pinned the new school timetable above her desk so she could check each lesson.

• verb

  Organisers will timetable the keynote speech before the lunch break.

Where does timetable come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining two much older words. The first half, 'time', descends from the Old English tīma, meaning a stretch or appointed point of time, and traces back to a Germanic root tied to the idea of a fixed span. The second half, 'table', comes from the Latin tabula, which literally meant a flat board or plank and later a written tablet or chart; it reached English through Old French as 'table'. By the early nineteenth century, with the spread of railways, English writers fused the two into 'timetable' to name a printed chart showing the times that trains departed and arrived. The spelling trap is simply that it is one solid word with a doubled 't' meeting in the middle (time + table), not two words and not a hyphenated form.

How the word is built

• time (Old English tīma: a period or appointed moment)
• table (Latin tabula: a board or chart); a compound noun