Widescreen describes a movie, television, or computer display that is noticeably wider than it is tall, more closely matching the natural shape of human vision.

When movies first appeared over a century ago, screens were nearly square. But in the 1950s, as television became popular, movie studios wanted to offer something TV couldn't match. They introduced widescreen formats that stretched the picture horizontally, letting audiences see sweeping landscapes, massive battle scenes, and grand spectacles that felt more immersive. Classic widescreen films like Lawrence of Arabia used this extra width to show endless desert vistas that would have felt cramped on a square screen.

Today, most movies and modern TVs use widescreen formats. If you've ever watched an old movie on a new TV and seen black bars at the top and bottom, that's because the movie was filmed in widescreen but you're seeing the full width preserved, even though it doesn't fill the entire height of your screen. The opposite happens when you watch older, square-formatted shows on a widescreen TV: you might see black bars on the sides instead.

The term can also describe the shape itself: a widescreen laptop has a display that's much wider than tall, giving you more horizontal space for documents, videos, or multiple windows side by side.