internment camp

noun

1. a prison camp for the confinement of prisoners of war, enemy aliens, political prisoners, etc.

2. a concentration camp for civilian citizens, especially those with ties to an enemy during wartime, as the camps established by the United States government to detain Japanese Americans after the Pearl Harbor attacks.

Word History and Origins

Origin of internment camp¹

First recorded in 1915–20

Example Sentences

"And the Everglades internment camp even more so," he said.

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They are building facilities across the country that can only be described as internment camps.

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France pushed hundreds of thousands of Cameroonians into internment camps and supported brutal militias to quash the independence struggle, the AFP news agency quotes the report as saying.

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By 1940, new policies ordered all German nationals - Jewish or not - into internment camps.

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But Trump’s base will be with him: six out of ten Republicans support military internment camps for undocumented people.

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Related Words

• gas chamber 
• gulag 
• prison camp