Summer is officially here, and you already know the vibe: parents are putting sunscreen on their kids, packing up their gear, and sending them off to summer camp. Today, we look at camp as a fun little getaway where kids go to play and roast marshmallows. But if you look at the history of the word, it wasn't always about recreation. Back in the day, "camp" was about survival, military discipline, and the daily grind.

Jennifer Hurd, an editor and lexicographer from the Oxford English Dictionary, explains that if you told an ancient Roman about "summer camp," they wouldn't have any idea what you were talking about. Back in the early 1500s, the word had zero to do with vacation. It actually came from the French word camp, which meant temporary military lodgings. And that French word came from the Latin campus, which was the field where Roman soldiers went to train and run their drills, according to David Wilton from Texas A&M University's English department.

The very first time "camp" was written down in English, it wasn't even about a win. Hurd says the first recorded mention in the early 1500s was about an army that basically copped out of a fight. They refused to battle, packed up their camp in the middle of the night, and slipped away. So from day one, a camp was just a temporary setup for survival and military maneuvers.

As time went on, the word started showing up in civilian life, but it was still about survival, not leisure. Wilton points out that in the 1560 Geneva Bible, "camp" was used to describe the temporary spots where Jewish people stayed in Sinai after leaving Egypt. Later on, it was used for the mobile settlements of nomadic groups like the Romani. By definition, a camp was never meant to be a permanent home—it was a temporary spot you set up because you had to.

By the 1700s and 1800s, "camp" was still about hard work. Hurd notes that old documents from the 1700s show surveyors and lumbermen living in camps while they worked. In the 1800s, you had sugar boilers working out of their camps and hunters setting up temporary shelters. It was all about utility—using the camp as a base to get your money and do your job, not to go swimming or tell ghost stories.

The whole shift to having fun in the woods didn't start until the late 1800s. Hurd found an 1876 Rhode Island newspaper article talking about setting up a mountain camp for boys. Funny enough, the actual phrase "summer camp" first appeared in a 1606 Latin translation about a Roman general who got sick and died in his "summer camp." Definitely not the kind of summer vacation people are paying for today.