Other forms: lanterns
A lantern is a light held inside a case, so the wind cannot put it out and you can carry it or hang it up. A paper one glowing red above a street at New Year, an old metal one swinging from a farm gate, a camping one on the table outside the tent.
The case is the whole point: a lamp is bare, a lantern is protected. Modern ones run on batteries, older ones on a candle or on oil, and the same shape sells today in glass and LED for the garden. Festivals keep the word busy — lantern festivals, sky lanterns let go at weddings, the hollowed pumpkin called a jack-o'-lantern. There is a technical use too: the glazed chamber at the top of a lighthouse, the part that holds the light itself, is the lantern.
1nounlanternA light inside a case of glass or paper that can be carried or hung up.
“He lit a lantern and went out to check the sheep.”
2nounglazedThe glazed chamber at the top of a lighthouse that houses the light.
“The keeper climbed to the lantern twice a night.”
lantern is a light.
Lantern came into Middle English as lanterne from Old French, and before that Latin lanterna. The Latin word is a reshaping of Ancient Greek lampter, 'torch' — the same family as lamp — pulled towards Latin lucerna, 'lamp', along the way. For three centuries English also spelled it lanthorn, because people assumed it was named after the thin sheets of horn used to glaze it; the guess was wrong, but the spelling lasted into the 1800s.
Ancient Greek
λαμπτήρ — torch
Latin
lanterna — lantern
Old French
lanterne
Middle English
lanterne
English, today
lantern
From Middle English lanterne (13th century), via Old French lanterne from Latin lanterna (“lantern”), itself a corruption of Ancient Greek λαμπτήρ (“torch”) (see lamp, λάμπω) by influence of Latin lucerna (“lamp”). The spelling lanthorn was current during the 16th to 19th centuries and originates with a folk etymology associating the word with the use of horn as translucent cover. For the verb, compare French lanterner to hang at the lamppost. Displaced native lēohtfæt.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
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