Campuses

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Locations that encompass buildings and facilities associated with academic institutions, typically consisting of classrooms and administrative offices
2. Areas containing university or college buildings and surrounding land used for education and support activities
3. Comprehensive sites that include educational, residential, and recreational facilities for students and staff

Etymology: "Campuses" is the plural of "campus," and the word's most surprising turn is that it began as an ordinary word for an open field. Borrowed from Latin "campus," meaning field, it is a doublet of "camp" and "champ," three English words that all descend from the same Latin root. The sense we know today, a university's grounds, is much newer: it first appeared in the 1770s in reference to Princeton University. The shift from field to campus happened gradually. Early colleges sat on open land, so the grounds around their buildings became the place people meant when they spoke of the college, and eventually the word came to name the whole educational site. Its plural follows the regular pattern for English nouns ending in "-s," so "campuses" simply refers to several such sites.

Synonyms: grounds, premises, facilities, locations, sites

Antonyms: deserts, wastelands, voids, emptiness