List of Bollywood actresses

Bollywood is the informal term popularly used for the Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. The term is often incorrectly used to refer to the whole of Indian cinema; it is only a part of the total Indian film industry, which includes several regional film industries sorted by language.Bollywood is the largest film producer in India and one of the largest centers of film production in the world.

Bollywood is formally referred to as Hindi cinema,though frequent use of poetic Urdu words is fairly common. There has been a growing presence of Indian English in dialogue and songs as well. It is common to see films that feature dialogue with English words phrases, or even whole sentences. The name "Bollywood" is derived from Bombay (the former name for Mumbai) and Hollywood, the center of the American film industry.However, unlike Hollywood, Bollywood does not exist as a physical place. Though some deplore the name, arguing that it makes the industry look like a poor cousin to Hollywood,it has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The term "Bollywood" has origins in the 1970s, when India overtook America as the world's largest film producer. Credit for the term has been claimed by several different people, including the lyricist, filmmaker and scholar Amit Khanna,and the journalist Bevinda Collaco.The naming scheme for "Bollywood" was inspired by "Tollywood", the name that was used to refer to the cinema of West Bengal. Dating back to 1932, "Tollywood" was the earliest Hollywood-inspired name, referring to the Bengali film industry based in Tollygunge, which rhymed with "Hollywood" and was the center of the cinema of India at the time. The name "Bollywood" later arose as the Bombay-based film industry overtook the one in Tollygunge as the center of the Indian film industry.

Here is a list of popular Bollywood film actresses :