Everything you always wanted to know about trailers but were afraid to ask

Yesterday morning somebody over on the TCM message board asked the question of why movie trailers are called trailers if they're shown before the movie we've paid to watch. I didn't know, but it was easy enough to do a bit of searching and find out the answer. The simple answer is that when coming attractions previews were first shown to moviegoers back in the 1910s, they were shown after the movies, in effect trailing the movies, hence the name.

The search led fairly quickly to this article at Straight Dope, which is interesting in its entirety.