How to Use nickelodeon in a Sentence

nickelodeon

noun
  • In rural areas and smaller cities, nickelodeons and storefront theaters took off.
    — Chris Yogerst, The Hollywood Reporter, 4 Apr. 2023
  • The picture would be shown only in little Main Street nickelodeons, where his friends would never set foot.
    — Longreads, 15 May 2018
  • My most vivid memory of my father was watching silent movies with him in a nickelodeon theater at a local museum.
    — WSJ, 5 July 2017
  • The decor includes an old-fashioned nickelodeon as well as a bathroom with Art Deco design.
    — Kate Bradshaw, Mercury News, 30 Sep. 2025
  • The earliest films, shown at nickelodeons at the start of the 1900s, had no credits at all, just the title.
    — Mekado Murphy, New York Times, 26 May 2017
  • The brothers quickly found a former New Castle nickelodeon spacious enough to show films.
    — Chris Yogerst, The Hollywood Reporter, 4 Apr. 2023
  • Signing up a music-minded teenager who can write code to program this three-legged psychedelic nickelodeon?
    — Los Angeles Times, 16 Mar. 2021
  • The concept was as simple as a soda machine, as efficient as a cafeteria, and as magical as a nickelodeon.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 24 Feb. 2022
  • Movies always follow technology — from nickelodeons to iPhones.
    — Clayton Davis, Variety, 25 Oct. 2025
  • As nickelodeons popped up in nearly every town, demand for films skyrocketed, and audiences were eager for new content.
    — Chris Yogerst, The Hollywood Reporter, 4 Apr. 2023
  • Among the stops on the Streets were the Usinger's sausage-making window, a nickelodeon that showed short silent films, a drugstore, a stable and a candy store.
    — Chris Foran, Journal Sentinel, 13 Feb. 2023
  • Around the turn of the 20th century, storefront nickelodeon movie theaters joined saloons, dance halls and bowling alleys as city gathering points.
    — John Jurgensen, WSJ, 4 June 2018
  • There, an early nickelodeon houses a collection of posters, books, photos, cameras and other movie memorabilia.
    — Steven Wayne Yvaska, The Mercury News, 2 Feb. 2017
  • By 1908 roughly 8,000 nickelodeons—five‑cent storefront theaters—ran nonstop shows.
    — Deni Ellis Béchard, Scientific American, 8 Nov. 2025
  • For over a century, the building was a neighborhood cornerstone, first as a church, then as an athletic club, and later as a nickelodeon that drew hundreds of attendees a day to its Yiddish vaudeville performances.
    — Luis FerrÉ-SadurnÍ, New York Times, 21 Jan. 2018
  • New York rabbi and cultural anthropologist Joshua Eli Plaut noted there were 42 nickelodeons — 5 cent movies — in the neighborhood, the most in the city.
    — Andrew Wolfson, The Courier-Journal, 15 Dec. 2017
  • In 1914, Frank Newman opened the Royal Theatre which was a forerunner to movie palaces in the city, a significant departure from nickelodeons.
    — Michael Wells, Kansas City Star, 28 Feb. 2025
  • Canny immigrant garment makers, glimpsing profits in a new gadget, the nickelodeon, gave birth to America’s movie industry (even if most of that industry soon departed for sunnier Hollywood).
    — Joseph Berger, New York Times, 9 Oct. 2017
  • Meanwhile, Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner – the Warner brothers – had been pioneer theater owners during the nickelodeon era, the period from roughly 1890 to 1915, when movie exhibition shifted from traveling shows to permanent, storefront theaters called nickelodeons.
    — Matthew Jordan, The Conversation, 12 Dec. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'nickelodeon.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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