Other forms: microfilms
Microfilm is tiny photographs of pages, read on a special machine. Search the microfilm, a reel of microfilm, on microfilm.
Libraries put newspapers onto it because paper crumbles and film does not, and properly stored it lasts five hundred years, which is far longer than any digital format has yet proved. Reading it means winding through a reel on a lit machine.
1nounmicrofilmTiny photographs of pages, read on a special machine.
“In the library basement, she searched old newspapers on microfilm for her grandfather's name.”
microfilm is a medium.
Middle English
filme
English
film
English, today
microfilm
Built from
From micro- + film. film comes 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