Flick

Part of speech: verb, noun

Pronunciation: /flɪk/

Definitions

1. A sudden quick movement or a motion picture film
2. A swift, sharp movement typically made with one's fingers or a brief display of visual imagery in film form
3. A rapid and light motion typically made by snapping a finger or hand ; a brief cinematic work usually shown as entertainment or art

Etymology: The verb "flick" has a surprisingly tangled backstory. Its earliest traceable form is the Middle English noun "flykke," meaning a light blow or stroke, and it was long thought to have been the source of the verb. Some scholars now suspect the causation ran the other way: the verb may be a back-formation from "flicker," a word for a quick, fluttering motion, with the verb's sense of a sharp, light touch arising from that rapid movement. The evidence is uncertain, so the direction of borrowing remains a matter of informed guesswork rather than settled fact. The noun sense most people meet today, a film or movie, is far more recent and comes from the way early cinema looked. Early films ran at a low frame rate, so when projected each image was visibly separate and the picture seemed to jerk and snap across the screen. Audiences and projectionists began calling the pictures "flicks" in that sense, and the name stuck long after the technology smoothed out.

Synonyms: snap, strike

Antonyms: hold, grasp