Cinema

How to spell cinema

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cinema

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cinema mean?

1. nounA theatre or building where films are shown to a paying audience.
2. nounFilms collectively, or the art and industry of making them.

Cinema in a sentence

• The new cinema on the high street has eight screens.

• She wrote a thesis on French cinema of the 1960s.

• They booked tickets for the late showing at the cinema.

• Digital technology has transformed modern cinema.

Where does cinema come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek kinema, meaning 'movement' or 'motion', which itself comes from the verb kinein, 'to move'. In the 1890s the French pioneers of moving pictures, the Lumiere brothers, built the word cinematographe from this root to name their combined camera and projector, literally a 'movement writer'. French speakers quickly shortened cinematographe to the snappier cinema, and English borrowed that clipped form around 1909 to mean both the films themselves and the buildings that showed them. The same Greek kinein lives on in everyday English words such as 'kinetic' and 'kinesiology', all of which share the underlying idea of motion. Knowing that the heart of the word is the Greek kine- helps explain the otherwise odd-looking single 'n' and the plain '-ma' ending.

How the word is built

• cine- (from Greek kinema: movement)
• -ma (noun ending), a shortening of cinematograph