Subtitles are the lines of text along the bottom of the screen telling you what people are saying. A Swedish film in a cinema in Leeds; a video on your phone on a loud bus with the sound turned off.
They come in two kinds: translated out of another language, or the same language written down for anyone who cannot hear the sound. British English calls both subtitles; American English says captions for the second kind, and closed captions name the door slam and the music too. The other route is dubbing, where new voices are recorded over the old ones, and the argument about which is better has run for decades. The word lives in the plural — put the subtitles on — and it works as a verb: the film was subtitled in six languages. One subtitle on its own is a different thing altogether: the second, explaining title under a book's main one, after the colon.
1nounsubtitlesLines of text at the bottom of a screen showing what is being said, translated or written out.~87%
“I cannot follow the accent without subtitles.”
synonyms: captions
2nounsecondA second title printed under the main one, explaining what a book or film is about.~11%
“The book's subtitle tells you more than its title does.”
3verbaddTo add subtitles to a film or programme.~2%
“The documentary was subtitled in six languages.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
subtitles is on-screen text.
Also accepted in games: captions
subtitle comes from sub- + title.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA