Word.ws English Dictionary

B roll

B roll noun: supplemental or alternative footage intercut with the main shot, used, for example, to indicate simultaneous action or flashbacks.

Noun

B roll (usually uncountable, plural B rolls)

  1. (usually) Supplemental or alternative footage intercut with the main shot, used, for example, to indicate simultaneous action or flashbacks.
    • The Bleeding Edge isn’t an audacious or essayistic piece of filmmaking; it’s overstretched with talking-head interviews, montages of corporate videos, and creepy B-roll shots of hospital equipment.2018 July 26, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “A documentary muckraker takes on the tech sector of health in The Bleeding Edge”, in The Onion AV Club, archived from the original on 29 Jul 2018

Forms of B roll

pluralB rolls
alternative formB-roll

Questions about B roll

What does B roll mean?
B roll means supplemental or alternative footage intercut with the main shot, used, for example, to indicate simultaneous action or flashbacks.
What part of speech is B roll?
B roll is a noun.
What is the plural of B roll?
The plural of B roll is B rolls.

Words near B roll in the dictionary

  1. B movies
  2. B plot
  3. B plots
  4. B road
  5. B roads
  6. B roll
  7. B rolls
  8. b sharp
  9. b sharps
  10. B stories
  11. B story

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: B roll (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “B roll.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/b_roll. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.