Stop Motion - Terminology

Terminology

The term "stop motion", related to the animation technique, is often spelled with a hyphen, "stop-motion". Both orthographical variants, with and without the hyphen, are correct, but the hyphenated one has, in addition, a second meaning, not related to animation or cinema: "a device for automatically stopping a machine or engine when something has gone wrong" (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993 edition).

Stop motion is often confused with the time lapse technique, where still photographs of a live surrounding are taken at regular intervals and combined into a continuous film.