tableau

1 a group of people attractively arranged (as if in a painting) [syn: tableau vivant]

2 any dramatic scene [also: tableaux (pl)]

English

Etymology

From French tableau < Old French tablel, "a surface which is used primarily for painting"

Pronunciation

Noun

1. a striking and vivid representation; a picture
2. a vivid graphic scene of a group of people arranged as in a painting

French

Pronunciation

• lang=fr|/ta.blɔ/
• SAMPA: /ta.blO/

Noun

1. painting
2. picture (a captured image)
3. board (on which to write)
4. table (arrangement of rows and columns)
5. chart

Derived terms

• tableau noir

Tableau (plural: tableaux; from the French diminutive of "table", sometimes meaning "picture") may mean:

• Tableau vivant, a motionless performance in theatre
• Young tableau, a combinatorial object built on partition diagrams
• Method of analytic tableaux (also semantic tableau), a technique of automated theorem proving in logic
• Any of four paintings by Piet Mondrian titled Tableau I through Tableau IV
• a cryptographic tableau used in manual cipher systems
• in solitaire terminology, a tableau consists of piles of playing cards in which gameplay (varying by the specific type of solitaire) occurs
• Tableau (linguistics), a method of evaluating ranked constraints over a set of candidates, used in Optimality Theory.

See also

• Table (disambiguation)
• Tableau (Restaurant)

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