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

Theres a lot of great info here, and I just wanted to add in this small bit about “movie” specifically.

Back when movies were first becoming a thing, slang had a relatively different structure in American society. There was a habit of adding “-ie” to the end of things, especially within the film industry. Walkie-talkie is a good example of this, as the device allows you to walk while you talk, and this extends to movies. It was like a picture book, but it moved, so it got called a movie. When the invention of movies with sound came around, there was still a lot of prevalent silent films and it took time for a full transition, during that time movies with sound were called “talkies”