Camera

How to spell camera

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce camera

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does camera mean?

1. nounA device for recording still photographs or moving images.

Camera in a sentence

• She packed a spare battery for the camera before the holiday.

• The phone's camera struggled in the dim restaurant light.

Where does camera come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from the Latin camera, which meant a vaulted room or arched chamber, and that Latin word in turn borrowed from the Greek kamara, describing anything with an arched or curved roof. For centuries it simply meant a chamber, and a trace of that survives in legal and architectural language, where a judge hearing a case privately does so 'in camera', literally 'in the chamber'. The modern photographic sense grew out of the 'camera obscura', literally the 'dark chamber', a darkened box or room that projected an image of the outside world through a small hole onto an inner wall. When inventors in the 1800s built portable boxes that captured those projected images on light-sensitive material, the long Latin phrase was trimmed down to plain 'camera'. The spelling stays faithful to the Latin, which is why the unstressed middle vowel is the easily forgotten 'e' rather than the 'a' some writers expect.

How the word is built

• camera (from Latin camera: a vaulted room or chamber), shortened from the optical device 'camera obscura'