Long before English speakers adopted the suffix –orama, as in Scoutorama and smell-o-rama, there was French word panorama referring to “a great display or spectacle.” Panorama comes from Greek words that mean “whole view.” University of Alabama professor Michael Piccone details the development panorama in French in his book Anglicisms, Neologisms, and Dynamic French. In English, panorama first referred to spectacular, long paintings slowly unscrolled before 19th-century audiences, and later inspired other words that likewise ended in -orama. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Origin of “Panorama””
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She’s been saving that one up.
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This is Nina Lyons, and I’m calling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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So, you know, maybe I’ll call you someday about Pittsburghese because…
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What’s on your mind now, though?
This is just something that always interests me.
The word-o-rama and, you know, where that came from and who started using that as a marketing piece.
I mean, I just really think that that word has always been very interesting.
We have a lot of these things, like, you know, we have a candy-o-rama in Pittsburgh.
We have a parts-o-rama where they sell car parts.
How did this all start?
How did the…
I mean, it sounds kind of Greek or whatever, but I don’t know.
Ooh.
Parts-o-rama.
Parts-o-rama.
Okay, we’ve got a history here, and I’m going to make this as brief as I can, although it could be long, all right?
-oh.
Word-o-rama.
There’s a really great section of a book by Michael Picone, published in 1996.
The book is called Anglicisms, Neologisms, and Dynamic French.
And the reason this book is important is because he’s done a great job of tracing orama from the word panorama, which we got from the French.
Now, why it came into English is interesting.
A panorama, you might not remember, isn’t just a wide vista.
It’s not just a view of, say, a canyon or an open plain where everything is amazing and the sun is setting.
A panorama far back in the 1700s was a huge painting, sometimes painted in the Trompe-Loye style,
You know, meant to fool the eye, make you believe that it was real.
A huge painting rolled up on vertical cylinders, kind of like imagine a scroll or a Torah, for example, but vertical.
And you would stand there or sit there in the audience in front of this panorama,
And it would be slowly cranked, and the scene would go past you as if you were, say,
Riding in a carriage across the real landscape. And you would view this beautiful scene. Sometimes
It was the jungle and the animals of Africa. Sometimes it was a battle scene. Sometimes it was
An imagining of what Israel looked like in the time of Jesus. There was all this interesting
Stuff that you couldn’t otherwise encounter. We’re talking pre-television, pre-movies,
Pre-photographs, right? Oh, it must have been thrilling.
Yeah. And so that was called a panorama. The French got this from Greek. So your instincts
Are good there, Nina. The pan means all or across. And the orama or the horama means a view, right?
Right.
Yeah. So it’s a whole view. Well, what happened was much later, I mean, these lasted for a while
And they had a kind of a few different names. Much later when film became a real thing,
People were casting about looking for terms to describe different kinds of ways of viewing film.
And they came up with a number of different terms that didn’t borrow the panorama,
Although a couple did. You have panoramic cameras, for example.
But they borrowed the orama suffix to indicate what they thought it meant,
Which was something amazing or spectacular or astonishing.
They started attaching orama.
But now, keep in mind, this is all still only happening in French,
And it hasn’t shown up in English yet.
So it’s not until the late 1800s, early 1900s,
That the English speakers start borrowing this from the French,
And we do exactly what they did.
We borrow the word panorama and the suffix, and we start attaching it to tons of stuff.
We have celorama, scoutorama.
Always had to do with a bit of a spectacle, always having to do with something phenomenal.
So it’s like an orama-orama, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So it starts in Greek.
It’s a manufactured word in French, borrowed by the English speakers from French.
And we both, both languages still use the rama or the orama suffix.
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