What is "metatable"

n. (context computing programming Lua English) A table (of key-value pairs) containing references to functions that dictate certain behaviours of an object.

A metatable is the section of a database or other data holding structure that is designated to hold data that will act as source code or metadata. In most cases, specific software has been written to read the data from the metatables and perform different actions depending on the data it finds.