How do people come up with new words for new inventions, like the word “film” or “movies” or “video” for when they invented video recording?

Question

Like when they created that riding horse video that it is the first video created, using the idea of frames per second and motion image. How do people think: wow let’s call this a movie, let’s call this a video etc

Or when they invented the train, they just go like “look at this amazing way of transportation, let’s call it a train”

In: 17

Answer 1

‘Audio’ comes from the Latin ‘I listen to’. ‘Video’ was deliberately coined to sound like audio, but using the root of ‘videre’, ‘to see.’

The term ‘film’ predates movies and photography, its original meaning is a thin layer of something, e.g. the film on top of cold soup or a super-thin piece of skin/leather you wrap around something. It was applied to the medium used for photographs because it’s a very thin translucent sheet. Then movies got called films because they came on rolls of individual film pieces. They got called movies as an abbreviation of ‘moving pictures’ just like ‘talkies’ is an abbreviation of ‘talking pictures.’