-orama

Also ‑(r)ama.

A display or spectacle.

The final element of panorama or cyclorama.

Panorama was invented about 1789 by the Irish painter Robert Barker to describe a very large cylindrical landscape painting which one could stand inside. He derived it from Greek pan, all, plus horama, view. It became famous, and a fashion developed of creating imitative terms for similar displays (cyclorama, cosmorama, georama, diorama). Cyclorama has survived to mean an illuminated stage backcloth, diorama is now usually a model representing a scene with three-dimensional figures. Futurama was an exhibit at the New York World's Fair in 1939. The introduction of the film projection system Cinerama in the 1950s sparked off a second series of imitations, this time of shorter-lived terms to indicate some spectacle. Their heyday was the 1960s and 1970s, but the ending has survived. Examples are sensorama, Scout-O-Rama (used in the US for large annual Scout events), and odourama and smellorama (adding scents to films, museum exhibits, and other media).