Movies

How to spell movies

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce movies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does movies mean?

1. nounMotion pictures, especially feature-length films shown in cinemas or watched at home.

Movies in a sentence

• They watched three movies over the long weekend.

• The streaming service added several new movies this month.

Where does movies come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'movie', a casual American coinage that first appeared around 1910 as a shortening of 'moving picture'. The root verb 'move' came into English in the 1200s from the Anglo-Norman 'mover' and ultimately from the Latin 'movere', meaning 'to set in motion' or 'to stir'. When projected film first delighted audiences, people described what they saw as 'moving pictures', and the snappy clipped form 'movie' soon followed, with the friendly '-ie' ending that English loves to add to familiar things. The word spread quickly from American slang into worldwide everyday use, even though British speakers long preferred 'films' or 'the pictures'. The spelling trap is the unstressed ending: the '-ie' before the plural '-s' is easy to garble, and people sometimes wrongly write 'movys' or 'moveys'.

How the word is built

• mov- (from 'move', moving picture)
• -ie (familiar noun suffix)
• -s (plural)