tableau means A striking and vivid representation or scene; a picture. It carries an Arena rating of 1817, earned across 19 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, tableau ranks #539 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #565 of 17,127 for Most Vivid Words, #956 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #3,058 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words.
tableau is pronounced /ˈtæ.bləʊ/.
Why “tableau” is a great word
A striking and vivid scene or picture, especially a static grouping of people arranged to represent a significant moment. From the French tableau ("picture, painting"), from Old French tablel ("a surface used primarily for painting"), a diminutive of table ("slab, writing tablet"). First attested in English in the 1690s. Unlike a "scene," which implies a dynamic, unfolding sequence, or a "diagram," which denotes a schematic for analysis, a tableau is a composed picture meant to be viewed as a suspended whole. It is the frozen anguish of a family receiving tragic news, the arrested riot of color in a market stall, or the perfect, breathless geometry of dancers caught mid-leap—a silent argument against the tyranny of time.
Etymology
Unadapted borrowing from French tableau, from Old French tablel (“a surface which is used primarily for painting”).
noun
- A striking and vivid representation or scene; a picture.
- A vivid graphic scene of a group of people or objects arranged as in a painting or bas relief sculpture.
- An arrangement of actors in static positions on stage, having the effect of pointing up a particular moment in the drama, conventionally revealed by opening tableau curtains (known as "tabs").
- A two-dimensional array or table of data, usually numbers, of various specific kinds.e.g.“For the tableau shown, there are three distinct procedures (one for each standard Young tableau of shape (2,1,1) with entries 1, 2, 3, and 4) for obtaining a Young tableau.” — 1994, Lynne M. Butler, Subgroup Lattices and Symmetric Functions, American Mathematical Society, →ISBN, page 92:
- A table that shows constraint violations of a list of candidates given an input and a constraint ranking.
- Mostly in solitaire card games, but also in other card and board games, the main area, where random cards can be arranged.
- A semantic tableau.
- A unit of a play, an opera, or a ballet with change of stage setting.e.g.“[…] several scenes from the first act were consolidated into one tableau […]” — 1994, Gerda Taranow, Sarah Bernhardt: The Art Within the Legend, page 158:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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