Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A movie camera or projector.
  • noun A movie theater.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An instrument devised in France for projecting on a screen photographs showing objects in motion.
  • To photograph with a cinematograph; to make a succession of photographic pictures of objects in motion. Also kinematograph.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun an older name for a movie projector, a machine, combining magic lantern and kinetoscope features, for projecting on a screen a series of pictures, moved rapidly (25 to 50 frames per second) and intermittently before an objective lens, and producing by persistence of vision the illusion of continuous motion; a moving-picture projector; also, any of several other machines or devices producing moving pictorial effects. Other older names for the movie projector are animatograph, biograph, bioscope, electrograph, electroscope, kinematograph, kinetoscope, veriscope, vitagraph, vitascope, zoögyroscope, zoöpraxiscope, etc.
  • noun A camera for taking chronophotographs for exhibition by the instrument described above.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun historical A camera that could develop its own film and served as its own projector.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French cinématographe : Greek kīnēma, kīnēmat-, motion (from kīnein, to move; see keiə- in Indo-European roots) + -graphe, -graph.]

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