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

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

There were already things called “train” when the railway was invented: an army on the march, for example, would be accompanied by a long column of wagons, carrying their gear and provisions, that was called “baggage train”. So when people saw a long column of wagons, pulled by a single locomotive, they’d call it a (railway) train.

A lot of inventions are either named for their similarity with an existing thing, as in the train example, or by describing what they do, possibly in Latin or Greek, like in “telephone” which is Greek for “far sound”.