cartographer

noun

car·tog·ra·pher kär-ˈtä-grə-fər

: one that makes maps

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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

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These are some of the questions the cartographers have been asking one another. —

Paresh Dave, WIRED, 28 Jan. 2025 See beautiful maps on eclipse cartographer Michael Zeiler's GreatAmericanEclipse.com and interactive Google Maps on Xavier Jubier's eclipse website. —

Jamie Carter, Space.com, 26 Jan. 2025 In the 16th century, the term began to be associated with collections of maps after Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish cartographer, published a book of maps in 1595 with an image of Atlas holding the celestial sphere on the cover. —

Erik Kain, Forbes, 6 Jan. 2025 The engineering team takes the data and hands it off to the cartographers. —

Kristin Shaw, Popular Science, 14 Nov. 2024 See all Example Sentences for cartographer