If you’re not familiar with the details of wavetable synthesis, a wavetable and a sample bank can seem extremely similar. A sample bank is multiple samples collected in a single bank, and a wavetable is multiple samples collected in a single table. But that’s where the similarities end.
In a sample bank, each sample is a complete sound that can be loaded into memory and played. In a wavetable, each sample is just a snapshot of one point on the first cycle of the waveform, not a complete sound. Each snapshot sample is stored in a “block,” and all these blocks together comprise the wavetable. So you could say that whereas a sample bank is many individual, independent sounds grouped together in a bank, a wavetable is many individual snapshot samples grouped together to make a sound.