cabin

pronunciation

How to pronounce cabin in British English: UK [ˈkæbɪn] word uk audio image

How to pronounce cabin in American English: US [ˈkæbɪn] word us audio image

Noun:

small room on a ship or boat where people sleep
a small house built of wood; usually in a wooded area
the enclosed compartment of an aircraft or spacecraft where passengers are carried
Verb:

confine to a small space, such as a cabin

Word Origin

cabin: cabin: [14] English acquired cabin from Old French cabane, which had it via Provençal cabana from late Latin capanna or cavanna ‘hut, cabin’. Surprisingly, despite their formal and semantic similarity, which has grown closer together over the centuries, cabin has no ultimate connection with cabinet [16], whose immediate source is French cabinet [16], whose immediate source is French cabinet ‘small room’.The etymology of the French word is disputed; some consider it to be a diminutive form of Old Northern French cabine ‘gambling house’, while others take it as a borrowing from Italian gabbinetto, which perhaps ultimately comes from Latin cavea ‘stall, coop, cage’ (from which English gets cage). Its modern political sense derives from a 17th-century usage ‘private room in which the sovereign’s advisors or council meet’; the body that met there was thus called the Cabinet Council, which quickly became simply Cabinet.

cabin (n.): mid-14c., from Old French cabane "hut, cabin," from Old Provençal cabana, from Late Latin capanna "hut" (source of Spanish cabana, Italian capanna), of doubtful origin. French cabine (18c.), Italian cabino are English loan-words. Meaning "room or partition of a vessel" (set aside for use of officers) is from late 14c. Cabin fever first recorded by 1918 in the "need to get out and about" sense; earlier (1820s) it was a term for typhus.