Paparazzi are the freelance photographers who follow celebrities in the hope of an unposed and very saleable picture; a single one is a paparazzo. The word comes straight from the cinema. In Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, released in 1960, the hero’s photographer sidekick is called Paparazzo, and English had adopted the plural by 1961.
Where the name came from is a small mystery with several suspects. Co-writer Ennio Flaiano said he took it from George Gissing’s travel book By the Ionian Sea, where it is the surname of a hotel keeper in southern Italy. Fellini told TIME in 1961 that the word made him think of a buzzing, darting insect, and years later offered another explanation involving an opera libretto. In Flaiano’s native Abruzzo dialect, meanwhile, a paparazzo is a kind of clam. Fittingly for a trade built on the unexpected angle, even its name comes in three versions.