Lamp

How to spell lamp

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lamp

What does lamp mean?

1. nounA device that produces light, typically using electricity, oil, or gas.

Lamp in a sentence

• She switched on the bedside lamp before reading.

• The old miner carried an oil lamp into the tunnel.

Where does lamp come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes ultimately from the Greek lampas, meaning a torch or a light, which was itself built on the verb lampein, 'to shine'. It passed into Latin as lampada and then into Old French as lampe before arriving in English in the early 1200s. The earliest English lamps were simple vessels of oil with a floating wick, and the word kept pace with the technology, stretching to cover gas lamps in the nineteenth century and electric ones in the twentieth. The same shining root survives in the modern English 'lamprey' and in the chemical term 'lambent' for a softly glowing flame. Because the spelling is short and entirely regular, the word never developed the silent letters or doubled consonants that trip up writers elsewhere.

How the word is built

• lamp (from Greek lampas: a torch or light), borrowed as a single unit with no prefix or suffix