Art & MusicGreek → English
Camera
/ˈkæmərə/noun
A device that focuses light onto film or a sensor to record an image.
The Greek roots
καμάρα
kamára
vaulted chamber
Literally: “arched room”
Follow a root:καμάρα2 words
The story of the word
καμάρα is anything with a curved roof, a vault or a covered wagon, and Latin camera kept the architectural sense. The photographic word is a stump of camera obscura, dark chamber, which for two centuries meant an actual darkened room with a pinhole that painters worked inside. When the room shrank to a box you could carry, the adjective fell away and the chamber kept the name. The same Latin word gives chamber, and, through a Spanish word for those who shared one, comrade.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1840
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
chambercomradebicameralcamaraderie
In a sentence
He shoots on a camera older than he is and refuses to explain why.