box camera
1
4.2
- noun
- /bɑks ˈkæmərə/
- Archaic
:
cámara de caja
- I had a box camera and a tripod, from my uncle.
- film in a box camera
Examples
-
Daddy said he'd taken the picture with a small box camera he had bought for a quarter from a friend of his.
Fiction book (1990) -
My first camera was a Kodak box camera, which my father gave me for my birthday.
Academic text (1996) -
His box camera is also on the desk.
Fiction book (1990) -
Danny is loading film in his box camera.
Fiction book (1990) -
The dying Rabelais got up from the floor, put on his tweed jacket, hung the box camera on his shoulder, and invited me to come along.
Fiction book (1994) -
Evoking the materiality of the box camera, this image is folded conceptually into the second photograph in Evans's sequence, "Penny Picture Display, Savannah, 1936" (Figure 7).
Academic text (2017) -
He captured beautiful portraits with his box camera during the family reunion.
-
The photographer explained how to use a box camera for taking simple landscape shots.
-
My grandfather still has a vintage box camera from the early 1900s that he loves to display.
Synonyms
∞
1.0
A machine that takes photos or records video
1
2.5
A machine that takes pictures using a lens and film or digital memory
A simple box-shaped camera made by Kodak around 1900
How Complex
1
5.5
38
1.3
1
4.8
2
3.4
- Archaic
1
4.2
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a simple camera shaped like a rectangular box' is directly and transparently derived from combining 'box' (a container/rectangular form) with 'camera' (photographic device); the compound denotes the camera's shape/type. This is a productive, cross-linguistically common noun-noun compounding pattern, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents can readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
Box camera comes from its shape: it was literally a box with a simple camera lens on the front. Because the lens did not change focus and the camera had very few controls, people called these plain devices 'box cameras', and today the term means 'a simple rectangular camera with limited settings'.