Campus

Campus (plural: campi) is Latin for "field" or "open space". English gets the words "camp" and "campus" from this origin. In English, the plural form campuses is commonly used.

The campus is the area in which a College or University and surrounding buildings are situated. Usually a campus includes libraries, lecture halls, student residential areas and park-like settings.

The word first was adopted to describe a particular urban space at the College of New Jersey (Princeton) during the early decades of the eighteenth century. Other colleges later adopted the word to describe individual fields at their own institutions, but campus did not yet describe the whole university property. A school might have one space called a campus, one called a field, and another called a yard. The meaning expanded to include the whole property during the twentieth century, with the old meaning persisting into the 1950s in some places.

Sometimes the land on which company office buildings, with the buildings, are called campuses as well, e.g. the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington, as are also hospitals with similar usage.

Sources

Dartmo: The Buildings of Dartmouth College

See also


Chirality   Index

This page is based on the Wikipedia article ''Campus''. It is licensed under the GNU free documentation license.


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