Other forms: cameras
A camera is the device that captures pictures and video. A digital camera, point the camera, on camera.
Nearly all photographs are now taken on phone cameras, which changed both the number of pictures made and what they are for. On camera means being filmed, and off camera means the part nobody sees. A camera obscura is the dark room the whole thing is named after. Note camera-shy; camera phone; and that a security camera is usually called CCTV in Britain.
1nouncameraThe device that captures pictures and video.
“He held up his camera and took a photo of the sunset.”
camera is a device.
Latin camera meant a vaulted chamber, from Greek kamara, something curved. The camera obscura was a dark chamber with a pinhole, and when the chamber shrank to a box the name came with it. Chamber is the same word.
Latin
camera
English, today
camera
Learned borrowing from Latin camera. Latin camera (“chamber or bedchamber”), from Ancient Greek καμάρα (“anything with an arched cover, a covered carriage or boat, a vaulted chamber, a vault”), of ira-old - origin, from ira-pro kamarā- (“something curved”), from kamárati, from Proto-Indo-Iranian kmárati, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European kh₂em- (“to bend, curve”). a doublet of chamber. device An an ellipsis of camera obscura, from New Latin camera obscura (“dark chamber”), because the first cameras used a pinhole and a dark room.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA