Other forms: films
A film is a story told in moving pictures. Watch a film, a good film, the film starts at eight.
Film is the British word and movie the American, though both are used everywhere. Film also means the strip of light-sensitive material cameras once used, and the whole industry: work in film. And it means a very thin layer of anything: a film of dust, a film of oil on water. As a verb, to film is to record: they filmed it in about nine days. Note filming, filmmaker, and cling film.
1nounfilmA story told in moving pictures.
“We watched a funny film at the cinema last night.”
synonyms: movie, picture
2nounthinA very thin layer of something.
“There was a thin film of dust on the old piano.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
film is a moving picture or thin layer.
Also accepted in games: movie
Old English filmen meant a thin skin or membrane. The photographic film was named for its thinness, and the entertainment took the name of the material — so a three-hour epic is named after a membrane.
Middle English
filme
English, today
film
Built from
From Middle English filme. From Middle English filme, from Old English filmen (“film, membrane, thin skin, foreskin”), from Proto-West Germanic filmīn-, from Proto-Germanic filmīn- (“thin skin, membrane”) (compare Proto-Germanic felma- (“skin, hide”)), from Proto-Indo-European pél-mo- (“membrane”), from pel- (“to cover, skin”). Cognate with Old Frisian filmene (“thin skin, human skin”), Middle Dutch velm, vilm (“fleece, film, membrane”), Old High German felm (“peel, skin, wrap”), Old English felma (in ǣġerfelma (“egg membrane”)). Related also to Dutch vel (“sheet, skin”), German Fell (“skin, hide, fur”), Swedish fjäll (“fur blanket, cloth, scale”), Norwegian fille (“rag, cloth”), Lithuanian plėvē (“membrane, scab”), Russian плева́ (“membrane”), Ancient Greek πέλμα (“sole of the foot”). More at fell. Sense of a thin coat of something is 1577, extended by 1845 to the coating of chemical gel on photographic plates. By 1895 this also meant the coating plus the paper or celluloid.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA