Other forms: tents
A tent is the cloth house you sleep in when camping. Pitch a tent, a two-man tent, the tent leaked.
It works by keeping rain out and letting moisture from breathing escape, which is why single-skin tents run with condensation and double-skin ones do not. A two-man tent fits two people and nothing else. Note big tent, meaning a party welcoming many views; and that the word comes from the Latin for stretched, since a tent is fabric stretched over poles.
1nountentThe cloth shelter you sleep in when camping.
“We put up our tent next to the lake and made a fire.”
tent is a shelter.
Old French tente comes from Latin tenta, from tendere, to stretch. Tension, extend and tendon come from the same stretching.
Proto-Indo-European
*ten-
Latin
tentus
Vulgar Latin
*tenta — tent
Old French
tente
Middle English
tente
English, today
tent
Built from
From Middle English tente, borrowed from Old French tente, from Vulgar Latin tenta (“tent”), from the feminine of Latin tentus, ptp. of tendere (“to stretch, extend”), or contracted from tendita as an alternate past participle. Displaced native Middle English tilt (“tent, tilt”), from Old English teld (“tent”). Compare Spanish tienda (“store, shop; tent”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA