Campus

How to spell campus

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce campus

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does campus mean?

1. nounThe grounds and buildings of a university, college, or other large institution.

Campus in a sentence

• The new library sits at the centre of the campus.

• First-year students are encouraged to live on campus for a year.

Where does campus come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Campus comes straight from the Latin word campus, which literally meant an open field, a level plain, or the flat ground where Roman soldiers drilled and athletes competed. The most famous of these was the Campus Martius, the 'Field of Mars' in Rome, an open expanse used for military exercises and public assembly. The word reached its modern academic meaning in American English in the eighteenth century, when it was applied to the open grounds of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton, to describe the parklike land on which the buildings stood. From there it spread to mean the whole estate of a university or college, and later any large institutional site such as a corporate or hospital campus. Because the spelling preserves the Latin form exactly, the ending is the smooth -us of a Latin noun rather than the -ous of an English adjective, which is the small trap worth remembering.

How the word is built

• campus (Latin: open field, level ground), used whole as an English noun