Informal term for movies or films; short for 'motion pictures.'
Derived from the word 'flicker,' which describes how early silent films appeared to flicker due to the intermittent nature of the film projection. The casual term 'flicks' became widespread in the early-to-mid 20th century.
The word 'flicks' literally preserves the oldest problem with movies—the original films did flicker, and even though modern screens don't, we kept the name, making it a linguistic fossil from cinema's earliest days.
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