What does Anamorphic mean on a DVD?

What does it mean when a disk is" Anamorphically Enhanced"?. Basically this means that the picture is stretched vertically on the disk. When the disk is played the picture is resized by the player depending on the shape of your TV set. For example if a film is in a 1.85:1 Anamorphic Widescreen format then on a conventional 4:3 format television the player will squash the picture to the correct size and insert black bars at the top and bottom of the picture. Play the same film on a Widescreen TV and the player will keep the same vertical resolution but stretch it widthways. The image therefore will maintain the correct aspect ratio but also fill the whole screen. The reason disks are encoded this way is to utilise the maximum resolution of the picture format (PAL, NTSC etc.) without wasting screen lines on displaying black bars. You quite often find that the term anamorphic isn't mentioned on the disk box. If you see "16x9 Enhanced for Widescreen TV", this basically means the same thing.