Campus (plural: campuses) is Latin for "field" or "open space". English gets the words "camp" and "campus" from this origin. In English, the plural form campuses is commonly used. The French equivalent, champs, is also well-known in English because of the famous Champs-Élysées in Paris, France. The derivative "champion", a combatant, is also connected with universities that happen to field one or more sports teams that win a national title.

The campus is the area in which a college or university and surrounding buildings are situated. Usually a campus includes libraries, lecture halls, student residential areas and park-like settings.

The word first was adopted to describe a particular urban space at the College of New Jersey (Princeton University) during the early decades of the eighteenth century. Other colleges later adopted the word to describe individual fields at their own institutions, but campus did not yet describe the whole university property. A school might have one space called a campus, one called a field, and another called a yard. The meaning expanded to include the whole property during the twentieth century, with the old meaning persisting into the 1950s in some places.