Cinematography

How to spell cinematography

14 letters · 6 syllables

How to pronounce cinematography

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cinematography mean?

1. nounThe art and technique of capturing images on film or digital media for motion pictures, including lighting, framing, and camera movement.

Cinematography in a sentence

• The film won an award for its stunning cinematography.

• She studied cinematography at a well known film school.

Where does cinematography come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word reaches back to the Greek kinema, meaning 'movement' or 'motion', which itself derives from the verb kinein, 'to move'. To that was joined graphein, the Greek verb meaning 'to write' or 'to record', the same element that gives us 'photography' and 'biography'. The compound came together in French as cinématographe, the name the Lumière brothers gave to their pioneering motion-picture camera and projector in the 1890s, the device that quite literally recorded movement. English adopted 'cinematography' around the turn of the twentieth century for the art and technique of motion-picture photography. The shortened word 'cinema' is simply the front half of the same root, which is a helpful reminder that the tricky middle of the longer word follows the same cinema- spelling before the -tography ending.

How the word is built

• cinemat- (from Greek kinema: movement)
• -o- (connecting vowel)
• -graphy (from graphein: to write or record)