A room or enclosed space.
A familiar word, four lives.
Greek
kamara
‘vault’
into Latin
Latin
camera
‘arched roof’
into Late Latin
Late Latin
camera
‘a chamber, room’
into Old French
Old French
chambre
‘room, chamber, apartment’
into Middle English
Middle English
chambre
‘a room in a house’
became English
English
chamber
Chamber begins with Greek kamara, a vault, and Latin camera, an arched roof. Through later Latin and French the word came to name a room. English chamber carries both a change in sound and an expansion from a covering to an enclosed space.
These are selected stages, not every spelling or intermediary. The story identifies omitted links; older forms did not all disappear at once.
The camera-looking stage is a real ancestor of this everyday room word.