Word.ws English Dictionary

seventh art

Syllables: sev·enth art/ˌsɛvnθ ˈɑːt/US/ˌsɛvənθ ˈɑɹt/

seventh art noun: the art of making motion pictures; filmmaking; cinema.

seventh art: the art of making motion pictures; filmmaking; cinema
Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

the seventh art

  1. (chiefly preceded by the definite article) The art of making motion pictures; filmmaking; cinema.
    • Georges Charensol's Panorama du cinema, originally published in 1927, […] was the bible of devotees of the seventh art.1948, Jacques Queval, “Three French Histories of Film [book reviews]”, in Hollywood Quarterly, volume 3, number 4, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 454, column 2
    • 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.2004 spring, Barry Keith Grant, “Diversity or Dilution? Thoughts on Film Studies and the SCMS [Society for Cinema and Media Studies]”, in Jon Lewis, editor, Cinema Journal: The Journal of the Society...

Origin of seventh art

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.

Words that rhyme with seventh art

32 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about seventh art

What does seventh art mean?
Seventh art means the art of making motion pictures; filmmaking; cinema.
What part of speech is seventh art?
Seventh art is a noun.
How do you pronounce seventh art?
Seventh art is pronounced /ˌsɛvnθ ˈɑːt/ (UK).

Words near seventh art in the dictionary

  1. seventeens
  2. seventeenth
  3. seventeenthly
  4. seventeenths
  5. seventh
  6. seventh art
  7. seventh chord
  8. seventh chords
  9. seventh cranial nerve
  10. Seventh Day
  11. seventh grade

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: seventh art (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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