wax tablet

[ waks tab-lit ]

noun

1. a tablet made of bone, wood, etc., and covered with wax, used by the ancients for writing with a stylus.

Word History and Origins

Origin of wax tablet¹

First recorded in 1800–10

Example Sentences

Brogan: Apart from that wax tablet moment, how long does it usually take you to learn a new song and develop a routine around it?

From Slate

The metaphors we use to describe our minds evolve with technology: Aristotle compared the mind to a wax tablet; Freud called it a “mystic writing-pad,” a device like an Etch A Sketch, which had recently come on the market; in the nineteen-twenties, the British psychologist Tom Hatherley Pear compared it to a gramophone; a few decades later, the American neuroscientist Georges Ungar said that it worked like a telephone switchboard.

From The New Yorker

The notion of the wax tablet indicates that the would-be mnemonist uses a fixed structure—a locality real or imagined, but instantly and intimately available to the mind’s eye—as its background and that the exercise of memory depends on juxtaposing the temporary thing to be remembered with that.

From Literature

She revives the Aristotelian image of the mind as a wax tablet and Dante’s portrayal of consciousness as an “inner book” to frame the contemporary, cog-sci model of the brain as a computer.

From Slate

Aristotle, for example, likened memory to a wax tablet in the mind upon which a person imprints knowledge and recollection as time goes by.

From The Verge