A "sideboard" is a large piece of elegant dining room furniture, made for holding cooked dishes on its top surface and storing linens, silverware, and other table settings in the drawers and doored compartments below. Typically, eight slender legs support the relatively massive structure above.

Garrett Deasy has a sideboard in his study, and it is a "walnut sideboard" that knocks Bloom in the noggin as he enters the front room of his house in Ithaca. Thinking of her friend Floey Dillon in Gibraltar, Molly remembers that the Dillons' house had a "mahogany sideboard" with "a solid silver coffee service" sitting on top of it. In Nausicaa Bloom thinks of Molly "leaned on the sideboard watching" him as he performed charades in Luke Doyle's house. It seems clear that for turn-of-the-century Dubliners a sideboard was an essential fixture in an upper-middle-class home.

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