projector

Other forms: projectors

A projector is a machine you use for showing movies or images on a screen. In the days before digital cameras, tourists would frequently take pictures with slide film that they could show their friends later with a projector.

Today, most theaters use digital equipment to show movies, although a few are still filmed on actual film and require an old-fashioned projector. While these days a teacher might use a large television and a laptop to show the class an educational film, they would once have had to use a projector and a film strip. Projector comes from the verb project, "cast an image," from Latin roots pro-, "forward," and iacere, "to throw."