Screenplay

How to spell screenplay

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce screenplay

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does screenplay mean?

1. nounThe written script of a film, including dialogue and directions for the action and camera.

Screenplay in a sentence

• She spent two years adapting the novel into a polished screenplay.

• The director asked for one final revision to the screenplay before filming began.

Where does screenplay come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a twentieth-century English compound built from two much older words, and it was coined as the cinema industry needed a name for the written script behind a film. The first element, 'screen', came into Middle English through Anglo-Norman 'escren', a word of Germanic origin that meant a shield or protective partition, the kind of fire screen that blocks heat; only much later, in the age of magic lanterns and motion pictures, did 'screen' come to mean the flat surface onto which images are projected. The second element, 'play', descends directly from Old English 'plega', meaning brisk movement, sport, or a dramatic performance, and it has named staged dramas in English since the Middle Ages. By the early 1900s the two were joined to describe a play written specifically for the screen rather than the stage. The spelling is wholly transparent once you remember it is simply 'screen' plus 'play', with the double e of screen being the only point worth pausing over.

How the word is built

• screen (projection surface for films)
• play (a written dramatic work)