The Oxford English Dictionary defines campshed as follows: ‘[a] facing of piles and boarding along the bank of a river, or at the side of an embankment, to protect the bank from the action of the current, or to resist the out-thrust of the embankment’. The word is attested from 1471 onwards. Coates explains the word as a compound inherited from Old English, which seems plausible.1 In the first element Coates recognizes the noun for ‘comb’, OE camb, and his account of the phonology and semantics is tenable. In the second element of campshed, Coates wishes to see the noun scīd ‘piece of wood’, nowadays obsolete in the form shide ‘[a] piece of wood split off from timber, esp. such a piece used in building a fire, a block, billet; a board, plank, beam’. Some lingering doubt remains, however, whether OE camb-scīd is correctly posited as the starting-point of campshed. It should be observed that OE scīd ‘piece of wood’ (corresponding to German Scheit) is not ideally suited for describing the kind of embankment meant here. The representation of originally long ī as e in campshed is also somewhat unexpected but could probably be accounted for. Under the circumstances, a different explanation for -shed may perhaps be submitted. In the context, campshed describes a construction that ‘divides’ different elements of the embankment. Consequently, we may envisage that -shed is related to OE scēadan ‘divide’.2 The campshed may originally have been a separation of the various constructions used for protecting the encampment. OE -scēad was a neuter substantive,3 therefore camb-scēad could function as both singular and plural. Phonologically -shed is to be expected as continuation of OE -scēad in unstressed position, and shed is actually found in a compound like watershed. It is proposed that campshed may be viewed as the continuation of (reconstructed) OE cambscēad.