Word.ws English Dictionary

undercrank

undercrank verb: to shoot a scene while advancing the film in the camera more slowly than it will advance on playback. This results in speeding up the action in the final film.

Verb

undercrank (third-person singular simple present undercranks, present participle undercranking, simple past and past participle undercranked)

  1. To shoot a scene while advancing the film in the camera more slowly than it will advance on playback. This results in speeding up the action in the final film.
    Antonyms:
    overcrank

Antonyms of undercrank

Forms of undercrank

third-person singular presentundercranks
present participleundercranking
past participleundercranked
pastundercranked

Origin of undercrank

From under- + crank; dating from a time when movie film was advanced in a camera by the turning of a crank.

Questions about undercrank

What does undercrank mean?
Undercrank means to shoot a scene while advancing the film in the camera more slowly than it will advance on playback. This results in speeding up the action in the final film.
What part of speech is undercrank?
Undercrank is a verb.
What is the past tense of undercrank?
The past tense of undercrank is undercranked.

Words near undercrank in the dictionary

  1. undercrackers
  2. undercraft
  3. undercrafted
  4. undercrafting
  5. undercrafts
  6. undercrank
  7. undercranked
  8. undercranking
  9. undercranks
  10. undercreative
  11. undercreep

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: undercrank (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-undercrank.wav.

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