cartographer

noun

car·​tog·​ra·​pher kär-ˈtä-grə-fər How to pronounce cartographer (audio)
: one that makes maps

Did you know?

Up until the 18th century, maps were often decorated with fanciful beasts and monsters, at the expense of accurate details about places. French mapmakers of the 1700s and 1800s encouraged the use of more scientific methods in the art they called cartographie. The French word cartographie (the science of making maps), from which we get our English word cartography, was created from carte, meaning "map," and -graphie, meaning "representation by." Around the same time we adopted cartography in the mid-19th century, we also created our word for a mapmaker, cartographer.

Examples of cartographer in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web
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The engineering team takes the data and hands it off to the cartographers. Kristin Shaw, Popular Science, 14 Nov. 2024 During the peak of the R&A effort, nearly a thousand political scientists, historians, economists, geographers, cartographers, and others produced about 2,000 long reports, many more short memorandums, and stacks of generic handbooks about other countries. David Priess, Foreign Affairs, 26 Feb. 2016 Or, to put it another way, the incompetent cartographers of Wall Street are, somehow, still in charge of the narrative. Jim Cramer, CNBC, 27 Oct. 2024 Elevation tables on Earth and plots of the lunar limb have been used by eclipse cartographers for years, with eclipse calculations gaining greater accuracy in recent years thanks to new lunar topography data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which orbits the moon and takes measurements. Jamie Carter, Forbes, 3 Oct. 2024 See all Example Sentences for cartographer 

Word History

First Known Use

circa 1847, in the meaning defined above

Time Traveler
The first known use of cartographer was circa 1847

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Dictionary Entries Near cartographer

Cite this Entry

“Cartographer.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cartographer. Accessed 15 Jan. 2025.

Kids Definition

cartographer

noun
car·​tog·​ra·​pher kär-ˈtäg-rə-fər How to pronounce cartographer (audio)
: a person who makes maps

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