Other forms: lamps
A lamp is a light you can put where you want it — on the desk, on the bedside table, in the corner of the room on a tall stand. You switch it on, you change its bulb, you knock it over reaching for your phone in the dark.
A lamp does not have to be electric: an oil lamp, a paraffin lamp, a miner's lamp on a helmet. Fixed outdoor ones are street lamps, standing on lamp posts. Some lamps are for heat or treatment rather than for seeing — a heat lamp over the food in a café, a sun lamp, the UV lamp at a nail salon. Keep lamp and light apart: the thing fixed to the ceiling is a light, and a lamp is the one you can carry. In shops and technical writing, lamp means the bulb itself, which is why a light fitting is said to take a lamp.
1nounlampA device that gives light, small enough to stand on a table or floor and be moved about.
“She turned off the lamp and lay there in the dark.”
2nounfixedA light fixed to a street, a vehicle or a helmet.
“The lamp on the corner had been broken for weeks.”
3nouncontainerA container of oil or gas that is burned to give light.
“They lit an oil lamp when the power went out.”
4nounproducesA device that produces heat or a particular kind of light for warming or treatment.
“The chicks were kept warm under a heat lamp.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
lamp is a source of light.
Lamp came from Old French lampe, from Latin lampas, from Ancient Greek λαμπάς — a torch, a beacon, even a meteor — and behind that a Proto-Indo-European root *leh₂p-, 'to shine'. Its Welsh cousin llachar still means bright. The English word it pushed out was lēohtfæt, 'light-vat': a vessel that holds light.
Middle English
laumpe
English, today
lamp
From Middle English laumpe. From Middle English laumpe, lampe, from Old French lampe (“lamp, light”), from Latin lampas (“torch, lamp, light”), from Ancient Greek λαμπάς (“torch, lamp, beacon, light, meteor”), from Proto-Indo-European leh₂p- (“to shine”). Cognate with Lithuanian lópė (“light”), Welsh llachar (“bright”). Displaced native Old English lēohtfæt literally “light-vat”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA