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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
Brendan Rascius, Miami Herald, 4 June 2025
John Brink, a Rand McNally cartographer, came up with a solution: Creating symbols for highways that were printed on the road maps and also put on signs attached to electrical and telephone poles along those roads.
—Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune, 1 June 2025
Evan Shapiro, known as the cartographer of the media universe, will be a keynote speaker at The Hollywood Reporter’s inaugural Access Canada Summit, set to run during the upcoming Toronto Film Festival.
—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
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Cite this Entry
“Cartographer.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cartographer. Accessed 2 Jul. 2025.
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cartographer
noun
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