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Bicameral is a formal word for a law-making body that is split into two parts, called houses or chambers. The textbook example is the United States Congress: the Senate and the House of Representatives. The UK Parliament also has two houses (Commons and Lords), so writers call that bicameral too. You use the word when you talk about how a government is built, not when you chat about today’s news. Though actually, camera here is not a photo camera. It is the old Latin word for a room or chamber — the two “rooms” where sit. Taiwan’s 立法院 is one house, so the opposite label is unicameral. Some countries keep two houses so that one can slow or check the other; that is the political idea hiding in the word.
兩院制
組成bi- (two) + Latin camera (chamber, room) + English -al.
同家族的字
- unicameralsame camera “chamber” piece, with uni- “one” instead of bi- “two”
- camerasame Latin camera “chamber” — a photo camera is named for a dark chamber
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
bicameraladj/bʌɪˈkaməɹəl/
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Being or having a system with two, often unequal, chambers or compartments; of, signifying, relating to, or being the product of such a two-chambered system.
- the bicameral anatomy of the brain
- By preventing legislative usurpation in the beginning, the bicameral legislature avoids executive usurpation in the end.
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governmentOf, having, or relating to two separate legislative chambers or houses.
- Once the Senate votes, aides said, the first order of business in the bicameral talks will be to set an overall dollar figure […].
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mediapublishingtypographyOf a script or typeface: having two cases, upper case and lower case.
- Aspect values on bicameral fonts are based on the size of the lowercase characters.
- Bicameral (upper- and lowercase) unserifed roman fonts were apparently first cut in Leipzig in the 1820s.
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human-sciencespsychologysciencesRelating to the functions of the two cerebral hemispheres in the history of human beings ‘hearing’ the speech of gods or idols, according to Julian Jaynes's theory of the bicameral mind.
- [The Linear B Tablets] were written directly in what I am calling the bicameral period. p.80; …to have an idea of the nature and range of the bicameral voices heard in the early civilizations. p.88; …how could [the brain] have been organized so that a bicameral mentality was possible? p.101; Like the queen in a termite nest or a beehive, the idols of a bicameral world are the carefully tended centers of social control, with auditory hallucinations instead of pheromones. p.144; …wherever and whenever civilization first began…there was a succession of kingdoms all with similar characteristics that, somewhat prematurely, I shall call bicameral. p.149; Bicameral gods [of conquering civilizations] are jealous gods. p.156, footnote; …I suggest that given man, language, and cities organized on a bicameral basis, there are only certain fixed patterns into which history can fit. p.159. How can we know that…idols ‘spoke’ in the bicameral sense? p.174.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。