Cinematic

How to spell cinematic

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce cinematic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cinematic mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to films, or having the visually striking, dramatic quality associated with the movies.

Cinematic in a sentence

• The drone footage gave the wedding video a cinematic feel.

• The studio is known for its sweeping cinematic landscapes.

Where does cinematic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This adjective grows out of 'cinema', which English took from the French cinema, itself a clipping of cinematographe, the projection device patented by the Lumiere brothers in the 1890s. That French word was assembled from two Greek elements: kinema, meaning 'movement' (from kinein, 'to move'), and graphein, meaning 'to write' or 'to record'. So a cinematograph was literally a 'movement-writer', a machine that recorded and replayed motion. By the early twentieth century English speakers had formed the adjective 'cinematic' to describe anything relating to film or having the dramatic, visual quality of the movies. The same kinein root for 'move' also gives us 'kinetic' and 'kinesis', which explains why the letters cine- carry that sense of motion.

How the word is built

• cinemat- (from cinema, motion pictures, via Greek kinema: movement)
• -ic (adjective suffix)