campo

Forms

campo m (plural campos)^[1] Old Spanish also wrote canpo, and 11th-century charters kampo.^[2][3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Old Spanish campo, inherited from Latin campus (“plain, open level ground”).^[4][5][6][1] In Latin the land that is tilled was ager; its use for such land is an innovation shared by all the Romance languages and already found in late Latin.^[4] Bénaben adds that the Latin word first meant a plain as opposed to mons (“mountain”).^[7]

The same Latin word is Portuguese campo, Galician campo, Catalan camp, Occitan camp, French champ, Italian campo and Romanian câmp.^[8][9] Aragonese has the derived forms campa and acampo.^[9] The Latin word also meant “battlefield, battle”, the source of the borrowed German Kampf (“fight”).^[8]

The Latin word is usually traced to Proto-Italic *kampos and Proto-Indo-European *kh₂ém-po-s, from a root meaning “to bend”, cognate with Ancient Greek κάμπτω (kámptō, “to bend”) and Lithuanian kampas (“corner”).^[1][10] De Vaan finds the Latin ⟨ca-⟩ hard to explain, and notes that Beekes takes the Greek words from a substrate language.^[10] Wiktionary also mentions a farming term borrowed from a substrate, which would explain the irregular correspondences.^[1]

Earliest recorded meaning

Corominas's first record is a charter of 931 in Oelschläger's list.^[4][5] In the Cantar de mio Cid (c. 1140, known from a 14th-century copy) it is a wide plain, the battlefield (lidiando con moros en el campo “fighting with Moors in the field”), the open country outside a town (en campo), and the marked-out ground of a judicial duel.^[11][12][2]

Semantic evolution

In the 16th and 17th centuries campo also meant “army”, from the camp or battlefield it occupied, in Diego Núñez Alba (1552), the second part of the Lazarillo (1555), Pérez de Hita and Lope.^[4] Covarrubias in 1611 recorded hacer campo “to clear a space” and “to go out to a duel”, batalla campal, the military office of maestre de campo and the field of a coat of arms.^[13] The Diccionario de Autoridades (1729) called it figuratively any space in which something fits, material or spiritual, as los campos de la imaginación.^[14] The Academy's 1884 edition added campo de Agramante, a place of great confusion, named after a character of the Orlando furioso.^[15]

Modern senses include the sports ground, the field of a science or activity and, in physics, a field such as the magnetic field.^[6][16] In Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico el campo is the whole country outside the capital, and in the Caribbean also the baseball ground.^[17] In New Mexico it means “camp”, an anglicism.^[1]

Timeline

• 931 – a charter in Oelschläger's list has the first record.^[4][5]
• 1069 – the spelling kampo in a charter of San Zoilo de Carrión.^[3]
• c. 1140 – the Cantar de mio Cid uses it for the battlefield and the open country.^[11][12]
• c. 1495 – Nebrija glosses campo raso with Latin campus.^[18]
• 1525 – the first record from the Americas, in Nombre de Dios, for a French army.^[19]
• 1552–1555 – the sense “army” in Núñez Alba and the second part of the Lazarillo.^[4]
• 1611 – Covarrubias records hacer campo and batalla campal.^[13]
• 1729 – the Diccionario de Autoridades records the figurative “space, scope”.^[14]
• 1884 – the Academy's dictionary records campo de Agramante.^[15]

Meanings

Noun

1. The countryside, open land outside towns: Pasamos el verano en el campo.^[6][1]
2. Land for tilling, a field.^[6][1]
3. Open plain, as opposed to hills or mountains; campiña.^[6]
4. Crops, trees and other things grown on the land.^[6]
5. The place chosen for a duel.^[6]
6. (sports) A pitch or ground, with its stands; each team's half of it.^[6][1]
7. Ground reserved for certain exercises, as in campo de tiro “firing range”.^[6][1]
8. A sphere of activity or knowledge, a domain: el campo de la botánica.^[6][1]
9. (art) The plain part of a fabric or paper with a pattern; the background of a picture.^[6]
10. (physics) A region of space in which a physical quantity is defined, as in campo magnético.^[6][1]
11. (heraldry) The whole surface of the shield, on which the charges are drawn.^[6]
12. (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico) The country outside the capital.^[17]

Word family

• campal
• campar
• campear
• campeador
• campero
• campesino
• campillo
• campiña
• acampar
• descampado
• escampar
• camposanto

Related words

• campana
• campaña
• campamento
• campestre
• Latin campus
• Portuguese campo

Usage notes

Set phrases include campo de batalla “battlefield” and campo de Agramante “a scene of confusion”.^[6] Campo santo (also camposanto) is a cemetery.^[1][9]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b Boggs, R. S.; Kasten, Lloyd; Keniston, Hayward; Richardson, H. B. (1946), Tentative Dictionary of Medieval Spanish, 2 vols., Chapel Hill, N.C., p. 95
3. ^ a b Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), data publication 2026 (CC BY-SA), Universität Rostock, p. s.v. campo
4. ^ a b c d e f Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 1, 791
5. ^ a b c Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. campo
6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n 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. campo
7. ^ Bénaben, Michel (2000), Dictionnaire étymologique de l'espagnol, Paris: Ellipses, p. s.v. campo
8. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 1563
9. ^ a b c García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. 1329
10. ^ a b de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
11. ^ a b Menéndez Pidal, Ramón (1908–1911), Cantar de Mio Cid: texto, gramática y vocabulario, 3 vols., Madrid: Bailly-Baillière, p. 118
12. ^ a b Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. campo
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. 1, 403
14. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 2, 101
15. ^ 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. 1116
16. ^ Real Academia Nacional de Medicina (2011), Diccionario de términos médicos, Madrid: Editorial Médica Panamericana; online at https://dtme.ranm.es, p. s.v. campo
17. ^ a b Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. campo
18. ^ Nebrija, Antonio de (1513), Vocabulario español-latino, Salamanca, ed. Marina Vidal Díez (2007), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, p. 309
19. ^ 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. campo