cinema [E20th] A cinema shows moving pictures, and movement is the root idea of the word. The Greek verb kinein ‘to move’ (the source of kinetic [M19th] and other kine- words related to movement) is the base, and was used by the French brothers Auguste and Louis Jean Lumière to form the word cinématographe for their invention of an apparatus that showed moving pictures, which they patented in 1895. Cinématographe was anglicized to cinematograph, which in turn was abbreviated to cinema, first recorded in English in 1909.