the.com/reel
the spinning heart of cinema, fishing, and your doomscrolling thumb — all named for going in circles
means A revolving spool used to wind up something flexible — film, fishing line, thread — or by extension a length of that wound-up material, like a movie reel or the dizzy stagger of someone who 'reels' from a blow.
from From Old English 'hrēol,' a device for winding thread, traced back to a Proto-Germanic root tied to spinning and turning. The dance called a reel — and the verb meaning to whirl or stagger — likely sprang from the same sense of going round and round. The fishing reel and film reel are later, literal-minded heirs to that ancient turning spool; the social-media 'Reel' is the newest cousin, borrowing the name of the spinning film it imitates.
- film origin
- Old reels held ~1000 feet, roughly eleven minutes of film
- dance form
- Scottish and Irish reels predate the cinema by centuries
- to reel
- Means to stagger dizzily, like after bad news
- fishing
- Bait-casting reels date back to 17th-century China
- modern bite
- Instagram launched Reels in 2020 chasing TikTok
charlie chaplin modern times — 1936 film featuring the famous factory conveyor belt scene with reel-to-reel footage