Intertitle

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A caption or card of printed text shown between scenes of a silent film to convey dialogue or narration
2. A title card inserted into the footage of an early movie to explain action or speech that cannot be heard
3. Written words displayed on screen between shots of a silent motion picture to give dialogue or story information

Etymology: The word is a simple compound: "inter-" (from Latin "inter," meaning "between") joined to "title," which here means a caption or heading. Its ancestry runs through Latin "titulus," an inscription or label, which English took first as "title" in Old English as "titul." Put together, an intertitle is literally a card placed between the scenes of a film. The sense of "title" as a line of printed text is older than cinema, and the film industry simply needed a name for the cards that sat between images. Those cards carried the dialogue and narration that silent pictures could not speak aloud, so the word describes a job the cards performed rather than anything in the picture itself.

Synonyms: subtitle, caption, title card