A Word That Means the Movies
Today the word Hollywood instantly brings to mind films, movie stars, and the glamour of cinema. People speak of a Hollywood blockbuster or a Hollywood ending. But Hollywood is not, at its origin, a word for the film industry at all. It is the name of a real place: a district within the city of Los Angeles, California. Understanding the name means going back to a time before movies were made there.
A Place Before the Films
The name Hollywood was given to the area in the late 1800s, when it was being developed as a quiet residential community. At that time it had nothing to do with filmmaking, which barely existed yet. It was simply the chosen name for a new neighborhood. The exact reason behind the name is not certain, and several different stories have been passed down over the years, but what is clear is that Hollywood was an ordinary place name well before the film industry existed.
The Film Industry Moves West
Early American filmmaking was based mainly on the east coast of the United States. But filmmakers gradually moved west to the Los Angeles area, drawn by practical advantages. The region offered reliable sunshine for filming, mild weather, and a wide variety of landscapes nearby, from ocean to mountains to desert, all useful for shooting different scenes. In the early decades of the twentieth century, film studios established themselves in and around the Hollywood district.
A Name Becomes a Symbol
As more and more studios gathered there, the place and the industry became deeply linked in the public mind. The name of the district began to be used as a shorthand for American filmmaking as a whole. Eventually Hollywood came to mean far more than one neighborhood in Los Angeles. It became a worldwide symbol of the movie business itself. So the name we now connect with cinema started simply as the name of a place, which history turned into a legend.
Source
This article was written using information from Wikipedia.