Camp

How to spell camp

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce camp

What does camp mean?

1. nounA place with temporary shelters such as tents, used for an outdoor stay, training, or military lodging.
2. verbTo stay temporarily in a tent or other shelter, usually outdoors.
3. nounA group of people who share the same ideas, cause, or allegiance.

Camp in a sentence

• noun

  The scouts set up their camp beside the lake before nightfall.

• verb

  They decided to camp in the forest rather than book a hotel.

• noun

  The negotiators formed a rival camp over the budget.

• noun

  The soldiers returned to camp after the long march.

• verb

  We plan to camp near the river for the whole weekend.

• noun

  Each political camp presented its own version of the plan.

Where does camp come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin campus, which literally meant an open field or level ground, and in particular the flat expanse where soldiers drilled and pitched their tents. From there it passed into the Romance languages, giving Italian campo and French camp, both carrying the military sense of an army's lodging place in the field. English borrowed it in the sixteenth century, chiefly through French, to mean the temporary quarters of an army. Over time the meaning broadened well beyond warfare to cover any temporary outdoor settlement and the activity of staying in one, and later still to a group united by a shared cause, as in a political camp. The same Latin campus survives unchanged in the modern word for a university's grounds, a reminder of that original sense of an open field. The much later informal adjective meaning theatrically exaggerated or knowingly tasteless arose in early twentieth-century English, though its precise route into the slang is uncertain.

How the word is built

• camp (from Latin campus: open field, especially a military training ground)