Camcording

Part of speech: noun, verb

Definitions

1. Secretly filming a movie being shown in a theater with a handheld camcorder in order to make pirated copies
2. Making an unauthorized video recording of a film during its screening in a cinema, typically to distribute it illegally
3. Illicitly capturing a motion picture on a camera from inside a movie theater so that bootleg copies can be circulated

Etymology: Camcording is a back-formation, a word made by stripping an ending off an existing word and treating the remainder as a base. The word it grew out of is "camcorder," a blend of "camera" and "recorder" that describes a portable video camera with a built-in recorder. Speakers saw "-corder" in "camcorder" and assumed it was a suffix like the "-er" in "singer" or "driver," so they split off "-er" and treated "camcord" as the root. From that root, "camcording" was formed, meaning the act of secretly recording a film in a cinema with a camcorder. Because the mistaken split came from "camcorder" itself, the verb is a clean example of how a word's own shape can mislead speakers. The "-er" in "recorder" was never an agent ending in the first place, so the new verb rests on a misreading of the original compound.