cinema

This one is a little French machine-part turned into a global noun. In the 1890s, the Lumière brothers in France needed a name for their moving-picture contraption, so they stitched together a Greek word for motion, κίνημα, with the writing idea in γράφω. That’s why cinema sits next to words like kinetic, biography, and telegraph, all hanging around the same old Greek workshop of motion and recording. English borrowed the short French form by 1899, and before long it stopped meaning only the building and started meaning the art form itself. So every time you say cinema, you’re really saying “motion-recording” with a Parisian accent.