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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
Etan Vlessing, HollywoodReporter, 5 June 2025
Some clever cartographer has dropped a label on Google Maps identifying the block as LiLA—Little L.A.
—Helen Rosner, New Yorker, 13 Apr. 2025
Players can choose to play Stars Reach as a cartographer who wants to map the galaxy, as a miner who wants to extract resources and sell them for profit, as a merchant who wants to build supply chains and manage economies, and so much more.
—David Jagneaux, Forbes.com, 2 Apr. 2025
In 2002, the two men returned to the bank in three sailboats with a team of architects, cartographers and marine biologists from several countries to continue building.
—Ian Urbina, Los Angeles Times, 28 Mar. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Cartographer.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cartographer. Accessed 17 Jun. 2025.
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cartographer
noun
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