celluloid

Any of a variety of thermoplastics created from nitrocellulose and camphor, once used as photographic film.countableuncountable

• 1894 June, Antonia Dickson, W. K. L. Dickson, Edison's Invention of the Kineto-Phonograph: Account of the Invention, article in Century Magazine, Volume 48, Issue 2, Then followed some experiments with drums, over which sheets of sensitized

The genre of cinema; film.attributivecountablefiguratively

• Celluloid railway comedy was hardly to appear again until the mid-thirties and, later, in Britain.
• In particular, they set Kerouac and Ginsberg to the specifications of an emergent superficial form—celluloid antiheroes—attractive to those in want of adventure and who would soon be reading On the Road (1957).

An item, such as a jacket, made from celluloid.countableobsoleteuncountable

• 'What with that bearded Assyrian bull in London, and this Thug down here, who has ruined my clean celluloid, you seem to be keeping queer company, Ted Malone.'