chambers

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of chamber.

   Cavers mapped a series of limestone chambers beneath the hill.

   Each of the engine's chambers fires in a set order.

   Note

   The ordinary plural, formed with -s, covers every countable kind of chamber: legislative rooms, bedrooms, the compartments of an engine. Several of the noun's room senses are normally plural anyway, such as the dated rooms in a lodging house. That is why one spelling serves both the regular plural and the plural-only words for a judge's or a barrister's office. Context, not form, tells them apart.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of chamber.

   The marksman chambers a round and steadies his breathing.

   This design chambers the cartridge automatically after each shot.

   Note

   The verb form shares its spelling with the noun plural, but its meanings come from firearms and combat. Someone chambers a round, and a gun can be made to chamber a specific caliber. A fighter chambers a limb before striking. Almost every use is transitive and needs an object. An old meaning, to be lascivious, is obsolete and should not be revived.

3. 3
   nounplural

   A judge's private office, used for hearings and matters that do not need to be held in open court.

   The motion was heard in chambers rather than before the full court.

   She reviewed the sealed documents alone in her chambers.

   Similaroffice

   Note

   Courts use this sense mostly inside one fixed phrase. A matter is heard in chambers, as opposed to in open court, and the phrase follows verbs such as hear, decide or review the way an adverb would. The noun stays plural even for a single judge, so you write her chambers and never her chamber. A judge's private room should not be confused with the barristers' office: one belongs to the bench, the other to the advocates.

4. 4
   nounBritishcountableplural

   The office of one or more barristers in any building; originally, a set of rooms at an Inn of Court used as both an office and a residence.

   He was offered a tenancy at a leading commercial chambers.

   The chambers took on three new pupils this year.

   Note

   The British bar's word for its workplace began as lodging at the Inns of Court. Boswell describes Samuel Johnson answering the door of his chambers in the Temple in his shirt, poker in hand. Wycherley's The Plain-Dealer (1676) already speaks of going to a lawyer's chambers. Today the word also names the group of barristers itself, so a chambers can take on pupils, and it takes "a" despite its plural form.

5. 5
   nouneuphemisticplural

   Ellipsis of the plural of chamber pot; a polite term for the pots formerly kept indoors for urinating and defecating.

   Before indoor plumbing, servants carried the chambers out at dawn to be emptied.

   The nursery's chambers were scrubbed and returned to the beds each night.

   Note

   A polite way of naming the pot: drop the word pot and only the room is left. The singular works the same way. In the Penelope episode of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), "wheres the chamber gone" needs no further word. The term also covers a child's potty during toilet training. Because the word so often means rooms, it only reads as a pot when the context is clearly domestic or bodily.

6. 6
   nounhistoricalBritishplural

   Areas of sea adjacent to the coast of England and Wales, enclosed by imaginary lines joining headlands, over which the Crown once claimed exclusive jurisdiction, now replaced by the territorial sea.

   Captains knew that hostilities within the king's chambers risked the Crown's anger.

   Considerable areas of sea were thus enclosed within the Chambers, particularly on the west coast.

   1974, Christopher Lloyd, editor

   Note

   A term of maritime law that survives in histories. It is usually capitalized: James Howell in 1633 writes of fleets that "confront the Kings Chambers." William Whewell in 1845 calls them bays enclosed along Britain's coasts, and by 1974 The Mariner's Mirror can say simply "the Chambers." Use the word when describing the old Crown claim. For present-day jurisdiction the term is territorial sea.

7. 7
   noununcountableplural

   A mid-morning break in the school day at Eton College.

   Lessons resumed once chambers had ended.

   She found him chatting in the yard during chambers.

   Similarbreak

   Note

   School vocabulary of the kind that only one institution understands. Sir H. C. Maxwell Lyte's A History of Eton College (1889) treats it as a fixed point in the day: a boy "presented himself at Chambers before 11 o'clock school." There it is capitalized and used without an article, the way a timetable names its fixtures. Outside Eton the word would be read as rooms.

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