seventh art
/ˌsɛvnθ ˈɑːt/
"seventh-art" is a 10-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“seventh art” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 11
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - The art of making motion pictures; filmmaking; cinema.
Corpus desk
Index EN-seventh-art · seventh art · English
seventh art · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 11 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "S" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | seventh art |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˌsɛvnθ ˈɑːt/ |
| Letters | 11 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “seventh art” in English
Rare enough to double-check
seventh art is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun, transcribed /ˌsɛvnθ ˈɑːt/. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "The art of making motion pictures; filmmaking; cinema.".
seventh art has no tracked misspelling variants, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, since its spelling is unusual enough that it doesn't cluster with a lookalike.
Etymologically, the entry records: Calque of Italian settima arte, which was coined by the Italian film theoretician Ricciotto Canudo (1877–1923) in 1921, considering filmmaking to be a new art combining the six previous arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, and poetry. Ca… The correct English form is seventh art, spelled S-E-V-E-N-T-H- -A-R-T.
Definition
- 1The art of making motion pictures; filmmaking; cinema.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how seventh art appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Georges Charensol's Panorama du cinema, originally published in 1927, […] was the bible of devotees of the seventh art.
Because of the inherent interdisciplinarity of studying film—once called, appositely, the "seventh art"—film studies was among the first disciplines to embrace such theories and methodologies as feminism, semiotics, and structuralism.
Etymology
Calque of Italian settima arte, which was coined by the Italian film theoretician Ricciotto Canudo (1877–1923) in 1921, considering filmmaking to be a new art combining the six previous arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, and poetry. Canudo had previously used the term sesta arte (literally “sixth art”) to describe filmmaking around 1911 when he did not include dance in the set of preceding arts.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.