Family name origins & meanings
- Reduced form of Dutch van Kampen, a habitational name from the city of Kampen in the Netherlands, on the east coast of the Ijsselmeer in the province of Overijssel.
- North German : Kampen is also the name of a village on the island of Sylt in Schleswig-Holstein. However, the German name is more likely to be a topographic name, from the plural or an inflected from of Low German kamp ‘enclosed field’ (see Kamp 1).
- Norwegian : habitational name from any of numerous farmsteads in southeastern Norway named Kampen, from the definite singular form of kamp ‘round hill top’, ‘boulder’.