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

On the home front, Romer shows how Ruth barnstormed Central California in 1927, a decade and a half before the U.S. government forced citizens of Japanese ancestry into internment camps there.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

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

Read more on BBC

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

Read more on Salon

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.

Read more on BBC

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

Read more on BBC

Related Words

• gas chamber 
• gulag 
• prison camp