A tableland is a large piece of high land with a flat top. Think of land that rises up above everything around it, but instead of coming to a point like a mountain, it stops and stays flat — like a huge table standing in the middle of the country. It can be very big: some tablelands are hundreds of kilometres across, big enough for towns and farms to sit on top. The word is mostly used in writing — geography books, travel writing, news about a region. In everyday speech, and in most science writing today, people say 'plateau' instead. 'Plateau' is the more common word by far. But 'tableland' is still alive in some places: in Australia, for example, real regions carry the name (the Atherton Tableland in Queensland), and there people say it without thinking of it as a bookish word at all. In Britain and America it sounds a little old-fashioned or literary. You will see it both as one word (tableland) and, in older books, as two words or with a line between them (table-land). Sometimes it appears in the plural, 'tablelands', for a whole area made of several of them.

高原、台地。台灣的地理課本通常說「高原」；「台地」用在比較小、比較低的那種，像林口台地、大肚台地。tableland 跟 plateau 中文常常都翻成高原。