English speakers use table for the furniture they eat at, the grid of numbers they consult, and, more loosely, the meal itself. The same short noun also names a negotiating session, a plateau, and, in older English, a writing slab. Those uses look scattered until the history is traced: they all grew from the idea of a flat, relatively thin surface.
The origin of the word table is a stacked borrowing rather than a single event. Latin supplied the root twice, through Germanic and through French, and English later stretched the noun from a tablet to a dining surface and then to a chart.
Two routes into English
Late Old English already had tabele, tabule, and nearby spellings for a flat hard surface, especially a writing tablet, a gaming board, an altar top, or a slab meant to carry an inscription. That line is a borrowing of Latin tabula, taken into West Germanic and then into English. Historical dictionaries place a weak feminine tabule already around the year 900. Standard American lexicography treats the English noun as established before the twelfth century.
A second, overlapping stream ran through Old French table, attested in the eleventh century for a board, plank, writing surface, painted panel, and even food or fare. Middle English table, from about 1200, is largely this French form. Spellings wobble for a while (tabel, tabil, tabul, and the rest) before settling on the modern word. The furniture sense in English is usually credited to the French side. Native Old English had other nouns for a dining surface, notably bord and bēod. Those household words did not vanish, but table took the main furniture job after about 1300.
The two routes are not rivals so much as reinforcements. Both rest on the same Latin noun. When Middle English spelling and French prestige pulled the form toward table, the older English tablet-word was already in place, so the later sense of a four-legged object had a ready home.
The Latin board
Latin tabula meant a board or plank, then a writing tablet (often waxed), a list or schedule, a painted panel, and other things laid out on a flat piece. The usual Latin word for dining furniture was mensa. English did not inherit a Roman dinner table under this name; it inherited a slab and later specialized it.
The further ancestry of tabula is uncertain. It is related to Umbrian tafle, a locative meaning roughly on the board, and is reconstructed for Proto-Italic as taðlā. Beyond that, specialists disagree. Some connect it with the same stock as taberna. Others start from a Proto-Indo-European form built on a root for flat, or on a root for stand plus an instrumental suffix, which would make the original sense something that stands, comparable to Latin stabulum. None of those deeper accounts is settled. It is safer to stop at Latin than to force a tidy Indo-European story.
Latin also fed other European languages. Italian tavola, Spanish tabla, and French table are Romance cousins. An earlier Germanic loan, probably before the year 400, produced Old High German zabal, Old Norse tafl (a game board), and Old English tæfl or tæfel. A later, more Latin-looking wave gave German Tafel, Dutch tafel, and Danish tavle. English therefore sits on both an old Germanic borrowing and a later French-Latin refresh of the same root. Direct learned borrowings such as tabula sit beside the everyday noun as doublets rather than replacements.
From slab to meal to grid
The oldest English senses stay close to a tablet or board: something you write on, play on, or set as a hard plane. The piece of furniture with a top and legs is recorded around 1300. Once that object is the place where people eat, the noun stretches to the food on it, from about 1400, and to daily meals at a lodging. English board still shows the same transfer in boarder and boarding. The meal sense is metonymy, not a new root.
By the late fourteenth century, table also names an arrangement of words or figures laid out for convenience. Table of contents follows in the mid-fifteenth century. The grid sense is the old tablet sense turned abstract: a surface for inscription becomes a surface for data. Multiplication tables, tide tables, and the database table of modern computing are later members of that same family of orderly arrays.
Gaming left a long shadow. In Middle English, tables was an ordinary name for backgammon and related board games, a use that faded around 1750. To turn the tables, from the 1630s, comes from that game: players swap positions, so advantage reverses. The verb table, from the mid-fifteenth century, first meant to enter a name in a list or to furnish with food. Parliamentary English, from 1718, used it for laying a motion on the Speaker’s table, which in Britain still tends to mean putting business forward. In United States usage from 1866, the same verb more often means to set a matter aside, sometimes indefinitely. The furniture is the same; the procedure is not.
Related English words keep the Latin shape without rewriting the history. Tablet, tabular, and tabulate are later formations on the same stem. Tableau is a French cousin that kept a pictorial sense. None of these is folk etymology; they are transparent morphology on tabula, not stories invented after the fact.
A dining word that still remembers the slab
A useful check on the whole path is the old English pair bord and table. One was the native household word for a plank and a meal-board. The other was a Latin slab that learned, through French, to stand on legs, to feed a household, and to hold a column of figures. The furniture in the dining room and the spreadsheet on the screen still share that one flat surface. The backgammon idiom is a reminder that, for a long stretch of English, a table was as much a game board as a place to eat.