the.com/screenwriter

means A person who writes the script—story, dialogue, and action—that a film or TV production is built from.

from A straightforward 20th-century compound: 'screen' (the movie screen, standing in for cinema itself, from an older sense of a flat surface for displaying images) plus 'writer.' The word rose alongside the film industry once silent pictures gave way to sound in the late 1920s and someone had to be credited with the actual words. Before that, the equivalent role was called a 'scenarist' or 'photoplaywright'—terms that quietly died once 'screenwriter' proved easier to say and better described the job.