camello

Forms

camello m (plural camellos, feminine camella, feminine plural camellas)^[1] Old Spanish also had gamello, in manuscripts of the Calila and other old texts.^[2][3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Old Spanish camello, inherited from Latin camēlus (“camel”), in the variant spelt with ⟨ll⟩.^[2][4][5][1] That variant is found in Latin as early as Pomponius and Cicero;^[2][6] Corominas puts it down to the common suffix -ellus, which still did not change the quality of the ⟨e⟩.^[2][6]

The same Latin word is Portuguese camelo, Galician camelo, Catalan camell, Occitan camèl, French chameau and Italian cammello.^[1][7] It was borrowed into Basque as ganbelu.^[4]

Latin took the word from Ancient Greek κάμηλος (kámēlos).^[5][6][8] The Greek word is a Semitic loan, with the Ionic change of /aː/ to /ɛː/ in the ending.^[8][9] The DLE and Corriente, Pereira and Vicente name Aramaic as the source, which Corriente finds hard to pin down;^[5][7][1] Wiktionary traces it to Proto-Semitic *gamal-, comparing Biblical Hebrew גָּמָל (gāmāl) and Arabic جَمَل (jamal).^[5][7][1]

Earliest recorded meaning

The Cantar de mio Cid (c. 1140) has the plural spelt camelos, which Corominas reads as a mere spelling of camellos: e otras azémilas e camellos largos “and other pack animals and tall camels”.^[2][4][10] The spelling camello is first in the Calila of 1251.^[2]

Semantic evolution

The General Estoria of Alfonso X uses camello pardal for the giraffe.^[11] Nebrija defines the camel as having one hump.^[12] Covarrubias in 1611 says camels were brought to Spain from Oran, and that camello also meant a thick rope.^[13] The Academy's dictionary of 1884 adds a short, heavy piece of artillery of old times.^[14] In the Canaries the dromedaries kept on the islands were called camellos from at least 1521.^[15]

In Spain camello is now also a small-scale drug dealer.^[5][16] Wiktionary explains the sense by dealers who carried their drugs on their back, some even in fake humps.^[1] The sense “job, paid work” is first recorded in a vocabulary of Texas Spanish in 1953, and belongs to Mexico, El Salvador, Cuba, Colombia and Ecuador.^[17][18] In Argentina and Uruguay camello is a coarse, dull person, and in Cuba and Uruguay a bus whose driver sits lower than the passengers.^[18][19]

Timeline

• c. 1140 – the Cantar de mio Cid has camelos.^[2][4]
• 1200–1250 – the Fazienda de Ultra Mar has camellos.^[20]
• 1251 – the Calila has camello.^[2]
• 1272–1275 – Alfonso X's General Estoria uses camello pardal for the giraffe.^[11]
• 1521 – camels (dromedaries) are recorded on Tenerife.^[15]
• 1528 – the first record from the Americas, comparing the llamas of the Río de la Plata to gamellos.^[21]
• 1611 – Covarrubias records the sense “thick rope”.^[13]
• 1734 – Basque-derived gambalúa “tall, gangling man” is first recorded.^[4]
• 1884 – the Academy's dictionary gives the etymology and the artillery sense.^[14]
• 1953 – the sense “job” is first recorded, in Texas.^[17]

Meanings

Noun

1. camel: a large ruminant of Central Asia, taller than a horse, with a long neck, a small head and two humps of fat on its back.^[5][1]
2. (colloquial, Spain) A small-scale drug dealer, a pusher.^[5][1][16]
3. (military, historical) A heavy, short-range piece of artillery of old times.^[5]
4. (nautical) A floating device for lifting a ship, or one end of it, to reduce its draught.^[5]
5. (Mexico, El Salvador, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador; colloquial) A job, paid work: Por fin consiguió camello en una panadería.^[5][18][1]
6. (Colombia) A heavy, tiresome task.^[18][1]
7. (Argentina, Uruguay) A coarse, dull-witted person.^[18][19]
8. (Cuba, Uruguay) A bus in which the driver's area is lower than the rest of the vehicle.^[18]

Word family

• camellero
• camellería
• acamellado
• camellón

Related words

• camélido
• Latin camēlus
• Portuguese camelo

Usage notes

The feminine camella is used for the female animal.^[5][1] Camello pardal is an old name for the giraffe.^[5]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 1, 786
3. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. s.v. camellus
4. ^ a b c d e Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. camello
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Real Academia Española; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2014–), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., online version 23.8, https://dle.rae.es, p. s.v. camello
6. ^ a b c Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ a b c Corriente, Federico; Pereira, Christophe; Vicente, Ángeles (2019), Dictionnaire des emprunts ibéro-romans: emprunts à l'arabe et aux langues du monde islamique (Encyclopédie linguistique d'Al-Andalus 3), Berlin: De Gruyter, p. s.v. camelo
8. ^ a b Beekes, Robert S. P. (2010), Etymological Dictionary of Greek, with the assistance of Lucien van Beek, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 10, Leiden; Boston: Brill
9. ^ Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
10. ^ Alonso Pedraz, Martín (1986), Diccionario medieval español: desde las Glosas Emilianenses y Silenses (s. X) hasta el siglo XV, 2 vols., Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, p. 597
11. ^ a b Kasten, Lloyd A.; Nitti, John J.; Gago Jover, Francisco (2002–), Diccionario de la prosa castellana del Rey Alfonso X, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (electronic edition 2024), p. s.v. camello
12. ^ Nebrija, Antonio de (1513), Vocabulario español-latino, Salamanca, ed. Marina Vidal Díez (2007), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, p. 309
13. ^ a b Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de (1611), Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Madrid: Luis Sánchez (Biblioteca Wordkers transcription, CC BY 4.0), p. 397
14. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies), p. 194
15. ^ a b Real Academia Española (2021–), Tesoro de los diccionarios históricos de la lengua española (TDHLE): Diccionario histórico (1933–1936), its unpublished slips, Diccionario histórico (1960–1996), DHECan, DHECR, DHEVen, https://www.rae.es/tdhle, p. s.v. camello
16. ^ a b Battaner Arias, Paz (dir.) (2017), Diccionario general de la lengua española VOX, Barcelona: Larousse Editorial, p. s.v. camello
17. ^ a b Real Academia Española (2013–), Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (DHLE), https://www.rae.es/dhle, p. s.v. camello
18. ^ a b c d e f Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. camello
19. ^ a b Santamaría, Francisco J. (1942), Diccionario general de americanismos, 3 vols., México: Pedro Robredo, p. 282
20. ^ Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), data publication 2026 (CC BY-SA), Universität Rostock, p. s.v. camello
21. ^ Boyd-Bowman, Peter (2003), Léxico hispanoamericano 1493–1993, ed. Ray Harris-Northall and John J. Nitti, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, p. s.v. camello