How does eloquent recognize tables?

I am curious about how eloquent knows in which table it should save the records we give it by running $ php artisan tinker . I do not actually remember setting so an option.

In Laravel when using Eloquent you should assign a table name using the property $table for example:

protected $table = 'some_thing';

Otherwise it assumes that the table name is the plural form of the model name and in this case for User model the table name should be users. Follwing paragraph is taken from Laravel website:

Table Names

Note that we did not tell Eloquent which table to use for our Flight model. The "snake case", plural name of the class will be used as the table name unless another name is explicitly specified. So, in this case, Eloquent will assume the Flight model stores records in the flights table.

// You may use this instead:
class Flight extends Model
{
    // Explicit table name example
    protected $table = 'my_flights';
}

So, if you don't follw this convention when creating/naming your database tables that Laravel expects then you have to tell Laravel the name of the table for a model using a protected $table property in your model.

Read the documentation here.