cartographer

noun

car·tog·ra·pher kär-ˈtä-grə-fər

: 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

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

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 After appointing cartographers, the United Nations announced that the Shebaa Farms is in Syrian territory, and Assad asserted that the land was Syrian in 2011. —

Mireille Rebeiz, The Conversation, 30 July 2024 See all Example Sentences for cartographer