英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

camera [camera 词源字典]: camera: [18] Latin camera originally meant ‘vaulted room’ (a sense preserved in the Radcliffe Camera, an 18th-century building housing part of Oxford University library, which has a vaulted roof). It came from Greek kamárā ‘vault, arch’, which is ultimately related to English chimney. In due course the meaning ‘vaulted room’ became weakened to simply ‘room’, which reached English, via Old French chambre, as chamber, and is preserved in the legal Latin phrase in camera ‘privately, in judge’s chambers’.

In the 17th century, an optical instrument was invented consisting of a small closed box with a lens fixed in one side which produced an image of external objects on the inside of the box. The same effect could be got in a small darkened room, and so the device was called a camera obscura ‘dark chamber’. When the new science of photography developed in the 19th century, using the basic principle of the camera obscura, camera was applied to the picture-forming box.
=> chamber, chimney[camera etymology, camera origin, 英语词源]
chamber: chamber: [13] The ultimate source of chamber is Greek kamárā ‘something with an arched cover, room with a vaulted roof’. This passed into Latin as camara or camera (source of English camera), and in Old French became transformed into chambre, the immediate source of the English word. Related forms in English include comrade (from Spanish camarada), originally ‘someone sharing a room’; chamberlain [13], which was originally coined in the West Germanic language of the Franks as *kamerling using the diminutive suffix -ling, and came into English via Old French chamberlenc; and chimney.
=> camera, chamberlain, chimney
dome (n.): "round, vaulted roof," 1650s, from French dome (16c.), from Provençal doma, from Greek doma "house, housetop" (especially a style of roof from the east), related to domos "house" (see domestic).

In the Middle Ages, German dom and Italian duomo were used for "cathedral" (on the notion of "God's house"), so English began to use this word in the sense "cupola," an architectural feature characteristic of Italian cathedrals. Used in U.S. also with reference to round summits of mountains.
vault (n.1): "arched roof or ceiling," c. 1300, vaute, from Old French voute "arch, vaulting, vaulted roof or chamber," from Vulgar Latin *volta, contraction of *volvita, noun use of fem. of *volvitus, alteration of Latin volutus "bowed, arched," past participle of volvere "to turn, turn around, roll" (see volvox). The -l- appeared in English c. 1400, an etymological insertion in imitation of earlier forms (compare fault (n.)).
vault (v.2): "to form with a vault or arched roof," late 14c., from Old French vaulter, volter, from voute "arch, vaulted roof" (see vault (n.1)). Related: Vaulted; vaulting.