camp

英文詞源

camp

camp: [16] Latin campus meant ‘open field’. It branched out into various more specialized meanings. One of them, for example, was ‘battle field’: this was borrowed into the Germanic languages as ‘battle’ (German has kampf, for instance, as in the title of Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf ‘My struggle’). Another was ‘place for military exercises’, and this seems to have developed, in the word’s passage via Italian campo and French camp, to ‘place where troops are housed’.

English got the word from French. Camp ‘mannered, effeminate’ [20] is presumably a different word, but its origins are obscure. Latin campus itself was adopted in English in the 18th century for the ‘grounds of a college’. It was originally applied to Princeton university in the USA.
=> campaign, champion, decamp, scamp

camp (n.)

"place where an army lodges temporarily," 1520s, from French camp, from Italian campo, from Latin campus "open field, level space" (also source of French champ; see campus), especially "open space for military exercise."

A later reborrowing of the Latin word, which had been taken up in early West Germanic as *kampo-z and appeared originally in Old English as camp "contest, battle, fight, war." This was obsolete by mid-15c. Transferred to non-military senses 1550s. Meaning "body of adherents of a doctrine or cause" is 1871. Camp-follower first attested 1810. Camp-meeting is from 1809, originally usually in reference to Methodists. Camp-fever (1758) is any epidemic fever incident to life in a camp, especially typhus or typhoid.

camp (adj.)

"tasteless," 1909, homosexual slang, of uncertain origin, perhaps from mid-17c. French camper "to portray, pose" (as in se camper "put oneself in a bold, provocative pose"); popularized 1964 by Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp." Campy is attested from 1959.

camp (v.)

"to encamp," 1540s, from camp (n.). Related: Camped; camping. Camping out is attested from 1834, American English.