seventh art
/ˌsɛvənθ ˈɑɹt/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.21 in modern English
16
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
2
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The art of making motion pictures; filmmaking; cinema.
Example Sentences
- "Georges Charensol's Panorama du cinema, originally published in 1927, […] was the bible of devotees of the seventh art."
- "Because of the inherent interdisciplinarity of studying film—once called, appositely, the "seventh art"—film studies was among the first disciplines to embrace such theories and methodologies as feminism, semiotics, and structuralism."
- "With some 40,000 professionals in attendance, Cannes is the world's largest annual convention, and a yearly thermometer for the temperature of the seventh art."
Etymology
Calque of Italian settima arte, which was coined by the Italian film theoretician Ricciotto Canudo (1877–1923) in 1921, considering filmmaking to be a new art combining the six previous arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, and poetry. Canudo had previously used the term sesta arte (literally “sixth art”) to describe filmmaking around 1911 when he did not include dance in the set of preceding arts.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˌsɛvənθ ˈɑɹt/
- British English: /ˌsɛvnθ ˈɑːt/
Inflected Forms
the seventh art (canonical)