Campus (plural: campuses) is derived from the (identical)
Latin word for "field" or "open space".
English gets the words "camp" and "campus" from this origin. The campus is the land on which a
college or
university and related institutional buildings are situated. Usually a campus includes libraries, lecture halls, student residential areas and park-like settings.The word first was adopted to describe a particular urban space at the College of New Jersey (
Princeton University) during the early decades of the eighteenth century. Other American colleges later adopted the word to describe individual fields at their own institutions, but campus did not yet describe the whole university property. A school might have one space called a campus, one called a field, and another called a yard.
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