Panorama sounds ancient, but it was invented to sell tickets. It is a Greek-built word made up in Britain in the 1780s for a new kind of entertainment.
Robert Barker was an Irish artist and inventor. He worked out how to paint a scene on the inside of a cylinder so that a viewer standing in the middle seemed to be surrounded by it. In 1787 he patented the idea, under the unexciting title "Apparatus for Exhibiting Pictures." He also called it La nature à coup d'oeil, "nature at a glance."
His first subject was the view from the top of Calton Hill in Edinburgh. He showed it in that city in 1788 and moved it to London in 1789. The attraction needed a catchier name than the patent's. Barker put together two pieces of Greek: pan-, "all," and horama, "sight, spectacle, that which is seen," from horan, "to look." The result meant a complete view.
Etymonline dates the coinage to about 1789. The earliest known use in print is in London's Morning Chronicle on June 11, 1791.
The business grew quickly. By 1793 Barker had built a purpose-made rotunda in Leicester Square, the heart of London's entertainment district. "The Panorama" ran there for about 70 years before closing in 1863. By the mid-19th century, panoramic paintings were hugely popular.
The word did not stay tied to the paintings for long. By 1801 a panorama could be any comprehensive view or survey, the sense most people use today. Film borrowed it as well: the camera move called "panning" comes from panorama.
The word's ending went on to have a life of its own. By 1824, English had pulled out -rama as a suffix meaning a spectacular display. It produced the cyclorama in 1840, a circular painting inside a cylindrical room, and Cinerama, the curved-screen film format, in 1951. Purists point out that the "proper" form would have been Cinorama.