Camping

How to spell camping

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce camping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does camping mean?

1. nounThe activity of staying outdoors in a tent or similar shelter, usually for recreation.

Camping in a sentence

• The family booked a weekend of camping beside the lake.

• Camping gear filled the back of the car before the long drive north.

Where does camping come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin campus, which literally meant an open field or level ground, and which was famously used for the Campus Martius, the training field for soldiers in ancient Rome. From that military sense of a place where troops pitched their tents, the word passed into French as camp and then into English in the sixteenth century, referring to the temporary ground occupied by an army. The verb 'to camp', meaning to lodge temporarily in tents or shelters, grew naturally from the noun, and 'camping' as the activity of staying outdoors for recreation became common in the nineteenth century as leisure travel spread. The same campus root still surfaces in the modern 'campus' of a university and in 'champion', once a fighter on the field. Spelling is straightforward: a single 'm' before the regular '-ing', since the short word 'camp' already ends in two consonants and needs no doubling.

How the word is built

• camp (from Latin campus: field, open ground)
• -ing (verb/noun suffix)