chamber
Pluralchambers
Verbchambers, chambering, chambered
Pluralchambers
Formschambers, chambering, chambered
- 1An enclosed space that occupies or resembles a room.
The explorers found a hidden chamber deep inside the mountain.
Sealed chambers beneath the temple had stayed untouched for centuries.
Note
Most compounds draw on this general sense: a canal lock chamber, a furnace chamber, a test chamber. In each, the noun in front names what the enclosed space is for, and chamber adds only that it is closed in on all sides. Room would sound wrong in all three, because nobody lives or works inside them.
- 2The room in which a legislature meets to debate and vote.
The bill passed after a long debate on the chamber floor.
Lawmakers filed into the chamber for the morning session.
- 3Any one of the heart's four hollow parts, namely the two atria and the two ventricles.
An ultrasound showed that one chamber of the heart was enlarged.
The upper chambers contract first, sending blood into the lower ones.
- 4The part of a firearm that holds the round of ammunition at the moment it is fired.
The soldier cleared the chamber before handing over the weapon.
Gas pressure inside the chamber drives the bullet down the barrel.
Note
Shooters and gunsmiths mean the rearmost part of the breech. The cartridge seats there, and the expanding gas is held there for the instant before the bullet moves into the barrel. The usual phrases are a round in the chamber and clear the chamber. The loading verb comes straight from this noun.
- 5A judge's private office, kept separate from the public courtroom.
The attorneys met the judge in her chamber to discuss the schedule.
He spent the afternoon in his chamber drafting the ruling.
Similaroffice
- 6A legislature, or one of the divisions into which it is split, regarded as a body of members rather than a place.
The lower chamber voted to approve the budget on Friday.
Reforms stalled when the two chambers could not agree.
Similarhouse
Note
Here the word moves from the room to the people in it. Its commonest frame is the pair upper chamber and lower chamber, as when a resolution passes the Senate but fails in the lower chamber. When a sentence says the chamber voted, it means the members of the debating room acting as one body, not the room itself.
- 7Any of the compartments in a revolver's cylinder, each holding a single round of ammunition.
He spun the cylinder and counted six chambers, all of them loaded.
A single round remained in the last chamber.
Note
A revolver multiplies what a rifle has once. Each bored compartment in the cylinder holds its own cartridge and lines up with the barrel in turn as the cylinder rotates. A six-shot revolver therefore has six chambers but a single barrel. A rifle, by contrast, has only one firing chamber.
- 8A private room belonging to an individual, especially someone wealthy or of noble rank.
The duke retired to his chamber after the banquet.
Her private chamber was hung with silk and lit by candles.
Similarroom
Note
A vaulted room in Greek, kamára, lies at the bottom of this sense. The word reached English through Latin camera and Old French chambre, which makes it a doublet of camera. Poe's "rapping at my chamber door" in The Raven (1845) shows the tone it carries: a private room, set apart, belonging to someone in particular. For an ordinary room, room is the neutral word.
- 9
- 10To load a round of ammunition into the firing position of a firearm.
The marine chambered a fresh round as the order came.
You must chamber a cartridge before the rifle will fire.
Similarload
Oppositeeject
Note
The verb grows directly from the firing chamber: to chamber a round is to seat it there. A hunter who misses simply chambers another cartridge and tries again. Load is the broader word. Chamber names the one step that puts a round where the firing pin can reach it.
- 11To make or alter a firearm so that it accepts a specific caliber of ammunition.
The smith chambered the action for a popular hunting cartridge.
Custom builders chamber the same receiver for several different calibers.
Note
Gunsmiths' usage, most often in the passive with for: a rifle is chambered for 9mm, or for a wildcat caliber. The phrase names the cartridge the gun is built to take. The same verb covers both the original build and a later change to a different, larger round.
- 12
- 13To draw a limb or weapon back to a position from which it can be launched with force.
He chambered his elbow tight before driving it into the pad.
Sprinters chamber the lead knee high to power the next stride.
Note
Martial artists use it for the loading half of a strike. A fighter chambers a fist, an elbow or a knee by drawing it back and coiling the joints, so the energy is stored before release. The object is always the limb or weapon, never the target: you chamber your fist, then throw it.
- 14To live in or occupy a room or set of rooms.
Two clerks chamber on the upper floor of the inn.
She chambered near the courthouse during the long trial.
Note
The intransitive verb of shared lodgings, and its natural partner is with. In the Publications of the Scottish History Society (1893), a writer recalls "I chambered with Alexander Preston," meaning that the two shared rooms. Without with, the verb simply says where someone lived.
- 15A single lawyer's office within a building that houses several.
The barrister's chambers looked out over the quiet square.
She rented a small chamber close to the Inns of Court.
Similaroffice
Note
UK legal usage, and most at home in the plural: a barrister works from chambers, and the same plural can name the whole shared set of offices in the building as well as one practitioner's rooms within it. Keep it apart from a judge's private office. Here the occupant is a lawyer in practice, not someone on the bench.
- 16An enlarged space within the underground tunnel system of a burrowing animal.
The mole had hollowed out a central chamber for its nest.
Ants connect their food chambers with narrow passages.
Note
Biologists use it for the widened places in a burrow, set off from the narrow tunnels that link them. Each one tends to have a job, and the job usually names it: a nest chamber, a food chamber, even a latrine chamber. The tunnel is the passage. The chamber is where the animal stops and does something.
- 17Rooms rented in a lodging house and let to tenants as living quarters.
The young man's chambers stood above a busy bookseller's shop.
He moved into a plain chamber at the back of the lodging house.
Similarlodgings, rooms, quarters
Note
A dated use that normally runs in the plural: one lived in chambers, not in a chamber. It names rented rooms inside a house shared with other tenants, as opposed to a dwelling of one's own. It reads naturally in Thackeray but stiffly in modern prose. For present-day lodgings, rooms or an apartment is the plain choice.
- 18A short piece of ordnance that stood upright on its breech without a carriage, used chiefly for celebrations and theatrical cannon fire.
Crews set up rows of chambers on the ramparts for the festival salvo.
A chamber was touched off backstage to suggest the roar of a far-off siege.
Note
Readers meet this cannon in accounts of old ceremonies and stagecraft, not of battles. It was fired for its report rather than its shot. Rows of them went off in festival salvos and royal salutes, and one touched off behind the scenes could stand in for a distant siege. Read it as a noisemaker with a cannon's voice, not a weapon of war.
- 19Ellipsis of chamber pot, now obsolete.
She slid the chamber from under the bedstead and carried it down at dawn.
A cracked chamber stood in the corner, hastily covered when guests arrived.
Note
The pot drops out and the room's name does the work. Though now obsolete, the shortening was valued as the polite word. In Elizabeth Metzger Howard's Before the Sun Goes Down (1946), a mother insists her children say chamber, never pee pot. That genteel edge is the whole point, so it reads as a period euphemism rather than a plain term.
- 20To behave lasciviously; to indulge in lewd or wanton conduct.
Note
An obsolete verb drawn from the private room and, above all, from the bedroom: what happened behind the chamber door stood for lewd indulgence. It belongs to older moralizing prose, where it keeps company with feasting and wantonness. Avoid it in this sense today, because modern readers take the verb to mean enclosing someone or loading a gun.
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Origin
The word comes from Middle English chambre, borrowed from Old French chambre, from Latin camera, which itself derives from Ancient Greek καμάρα (kamára, "vaulted chamber"). It is a doublet of camera.