decamp

• French décamper, Old French descamper.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /diːˈkæmp/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -æmp

decamp (third-person singular simple present decamps, present participle decamping, simple past and past participle decamped)

1. (intransitive) To break up camp and move on.
2. (intransitive) To disappear suddenly and secretly.
   • 2019 June 8, Kitty Empire, “Madonna: Madame X review – a splendidly bizarre return to form”, in The Guardian‎:

     Colombia is a red herring, however. The songs that became Madame X actually came together during Madonna’s two years in Portugal, where she decamped in 2017 when her son David enrolled in Benfica’s football academy. Madonna absorbed the local sounds with more of a mature, simpatico rather than asset-stripping eye.

   • 1922 February, James Joyce, “[Episode 16]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, , →OCLC:

     Though unusual in the Dublin area he knew that it was not by any means unknown for desperadoes who had next to nothing to live on to be abroad waylaying and generally terrorising peaceable pedestrians by placing a pistol at their head in some secluded spot outside the city proper, famished loiterers of the Thames embankment category they might be hanging about there or simply marauders ready to decamp with whatever boodle they could in one fell swoop at a moment's notice, your money or your life, leaving you there to point a moral, gagged and garrotted.

3. (perhaps, nonstandard) To debark, to disembark.
   • 2019 April 18, Kenn Gordon, The Return of Seven, Xlibris Corporation, →ISBN:

     I let the civilian members of our team decamp the bus first and then the main members of Team Seven and finally the hippie from Iceland, Oran! ACT 50 I noticed an RAF truck at the bottom.

   • 2011 May 14, Ann Timonin, Peter Timonin, Chinese Characters, Xlibris Corporation, →ISBN, page 161:

     It required much honking of horns (not only the bus's), several passengers decamping like rats leaving a sinking ship, and much waiting around while a large truck trying to negotiate the same alley found room to back up […]

   • 2021 July 22, E.J. Kahn, Jr., Jock: The Life and Times of John Hay Whitney, Plunkett Lake Press:

     That vehicle was incapacitated when, during a strafing attack by American planes, its driver neglected to set its brakes before decamping, and the bus crashed into a stone wall. Whitney spent the next three nights in a windowless cellar […]

• abscond
• absquatulate

• camped