cartographer
Americannoun
Etymology
Origin of cartographer
First recorded in 1840–50; equivalent to cart(e) ( def. ) + -o- ( def. ) + -graph ( def. ) + -er 1 ( def. )
Explanation
Unless you’re the one guy in America who actually asks for directions, you’ve probably broken down and used a map at some point in your life. The cartographer is the person you should thank for getting you un-lost — the mapmaker. A cartographer is a person who creates maps, whether they’re of the world, the local bus routes, or buried pirate treasure. It comes to us from the Latin word charta-, which means “tablet or leaf of paper,” and the Greek word graphein, meaning to write or draw. These days, a cartographer doesn’t have to work on paper––it's all computers, making electronic maps as part of GPS software. Technically, a cartographer can make charts, too.
Vocabulary lists containing cartographer
100 SAT words Beginning with "C"
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100 Great Words from "Fahrenheit 451" -- Part I Vocabulary
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Content Summary G.1: Principles of Geography
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
When the cartographer James Cheshire stumbled into the room in University College London several years ago, he encountered less a resource for mapping the modern globe than “an epitaph of a world we once knew.”
From The Wall Street Journal • Oct. 31, 2025
Eclipse cartographer Michael Zeiler told USA Today that the moon phase would be no more than 5 to 6 hours old at sunset, making it impossible to see the crescent that evening.
From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 9, 2024
Medical diagnostics expert, doctor's assistant, and cartographer are all fair titles for an artificial intelligence model developed by researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
From Science Daily • Mar. 4, 2024
Cosmic cartographer Brent Tully was inspecting his team’s latest high-precision maps of the positions and motions of 56,000 galaxies in the local universe when he noticed a colossal ringlike structure.
From Scientific American • Sep. 27, 2023
“A cartographer draws the Delimitation of Boundaries in maps.”
From "When I Was Puerto Rican" by Esmeralda Santiago
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
