dinner-table

dinner-table (plural dinner-tables)

1. Archaic form of dinner table.
   • 1852, William Hamilton Maxwell, Highlands and Islands:

     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 […]

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

     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.

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

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

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

     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 […]

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

     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.

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

     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.

   • 1918, Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams:

     Even among friends at the dinner-table he talked as though he were denouncing them, or someone else, on a platform; he measured his phrases, built his sentences, cumulated his effects, and pounded his opponents, real or imagined.

   • 1919, Ronald Firbank, Valmouth, London: Grant Richards, page 46:

     In the taper-lit, perhaps pre-sixteeth-century room—a piece of Laughing and Triumphing needlework in the style of Rubens completely hid the walls—the capacious oval of the dinner-table, crowned by a monteith bowl filled with slipper-orchids, showed agreeably enough.