Small solid pieces of medicine you swallow, or flat devices like iPads used for reading and computing.
From Latin 'tabula' (board, plank, table) + '-et' (diminutive suffix), originally meaning small flat surfaces or writing surfaces before applying to medicine in the 1800s.
Tablets brilliantly show how one word can describe two completely different inventions—flat pieces of medicine from chemistry and flat computers from technology—because both are just flat, portable things you hold in your hand.
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