tabula

Noun

1. A plate or frame on which a title or inscription is carved.
   • The tabula is here seen to have an irregular structure of coarse mesh whose interstices are occupied by a finer mesh. - 1937, Kyancutta Museum, Memoirs - Issues 4-6, page 103:
   • A.D. Fragment of an inscription in a tabula carved in the rock. - 1982, H. W. Pleket, R. S. Stroud, Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum [SEG]: 1978, page 227:
   • The date is written above the tabula and down the right side, which is worn; the main text is written within the tabula, with each line of verse separated by an incised line. - 1989, Charlotte Roueché, Joyce Maire...
2. A table, index, or list of data.
   • Another tabula on third fly-leaf, and some writing in a later hand. Titles and initials throughout in red and blue. - 1908, James Maurice Wilson, Cosmo Alexander Gordon, Early Compotus Rolls of the Priory of Worcester,...
   • Another tabula represents the rate of morbidity according to different organs and age groups. - 1962, Neoplasma, page 221:
   • This may be done on the spot, or the initial tabula(e) may be delineated prior to the meeting (e.g., via an agreed agenda or results from a prior session). The ongoing course of tabulation will then be an open-ended...
3. A legal record.
   • However, as Ugolinus is known as an industrious, honourable man, acquainted with his subject, and who cannot easily be suspected of fraud, there is nothing against assuming the probability that at the publication of his...
   • On the other hand, the acquisition of the legal estate merely as a tabula is usually not a transaction for value, and here at any rate the fact that it is conveyed in breach of an express trust will prevail to take it...
   • The soldiers who dedicated the tabula to the empress might have had a personal connection with her, but if so, it was not a typical relationship. - 2013, Julie Langford, Maternal Megalomania: Julia Domna and the...
4. A writing-tablet, slate, or similar medium on which to write.
   • On the tabula of the mind she tried to write the word. - 2010, John Lawton, A Lily of the Field:
   • Can we send them a message? With your tabula perhaps, the way Olwen did when Moira needed you? - 2014, Alyxandra Harvey, A Breath of Frost, page 403:
   • The mind is a tabula to engrave the story of reality's cataclysmic impacts, the individual—a tool through which history confides it to mankind. - 2014, Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva, The Testimonies of Russian and...
5. A frontal; a drapery for an altar.
   • Another tabula in the Textile Museum in Washington D.C. probably belonged to the same textile. - 2004, Sabine Schrenk, Textilien des Mittelmeerraumes aus spätantiker bis tru:hisiamischer Zeit, Abegg-Stiftung, page 470:
   • Another tabula in Paris shows the same characteristics but even more progressively stylized and is therefore dated to the Arabian period, eighth to ninth century. - 2005, Peter Noever, Angela Völker, Fragile remnants,...
   • Another tabula ( cat.89 ) recalls the naturalistic concept of the classic Graeco-Roman portrait, in widespread use up to the 4th or 5th century. - 2006, HALI: The International Journal of Oriental Carpets and Textiles,...
6. An ancient Roman game similar to backgammon that was played on a board with 24 divisions.
   • Readers may like to make a tabula board and try a simple game from France using two cubic dice. - 1974, Games & Puzzles - Issues 21-31, page 5:
   • A bronze mirror from about 200 B.C. depicts a young man and a young woman playing tabula. - 2002, Steve Craig, Sports and Games of the Ancients, page 113:
   • Two men hunched in silence over black and white counters on a tabula board which had been carved around the edge with scenes of warriors at arms. - 2011, James Wilde, Hereward, page 209:
7. One of the transverse plants found in the calicles of certain corals and hydroids.
   • The tabulæ may be well developed, approximately horizontal, remote plates, as is usually the case in Zaphrentis and Amplexus, or they may anastomoze in various ways, and become so intimately connected with one another...
   • When fully developed (fig. 66), they are transverse plates, which extend completely across the visceral chamber, and divide it into a series of stories placed one above the other, the only living portion of the coral...
   • Septa from 110 to 124, of two orders. The principal ones can be traced almost to the centre as crests on the tabulæ. The secondaries scarcely attain 4 millimetres, including the epitheca. They often bend towards the...