cartography
Americannoun
noun
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of cartography
Explanation
Have you ever tried to draw a map of your neighborhood? If you’re drawing your map to scale, taking into account every little hill and valley, you can appreciate the challenge of cartography, the science of making maps. You may think cartography has gone the way of the dodo bird, now that we’ve got Google maps and GPS devices. You don’t have to draw maps by hand anymore, but you still need cartography skills to turn digital representations into something people can use with ease. While the word cartography dates only from the mid-19th century, maps were around for a long, long time before that. Cartography comes from the French carte, “map,” and -graphie, “writing.”
Vocabulary lists containing cartography
Write On!: Graph and Gram
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Human Geography - Middle School
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Human Geography - High School
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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.
“Critical Cartography: Larissa Fassler in Manchester” includes drawings, paintings and sculptures based on research and observation of cities.
From Washington Times • Nov. 15, 2020
Although Tarrat’s “Unmapped Cartography: Postcards From the Past and Other Foreign Countries” includes a few of Spurlock’s imaginary maps, most of it is based on actual places.
From Washington Post • Oct. 13, 2017
The news at Neighborhood Church was the premiere of David Brynjar Franzson's "The Cartography of Time."
From Los Angeles Times • Jul. 29, 2015
Susan Schulten is a history professor at the University of Denver and the author of “The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950” and “Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America.”
From New York Times • Jun. 6, 2013
Cartography came as a technological package, along with gunpowder weaponry; and gunpowder weaponry really is about power, and nothing else.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
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.
