cartographer

noun car·tog·ra·pher \ kär-ˈtä-grə-fər \

Updated on: 16 Mar 2018

Definition of cartographer

: one that makes maps

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Recent Examples of cartographer from the Web

In this new version, cartographer Kenneth Field wanted to include all votes — not just those of the victor in each area.

— eliza mccarthy, Daily Intelligencer, "A New 2016 Election Voting Map Promotes … Subtlety," 9 Mar. 2018
As explained in this video from RealLifeLore, the Coastline Paradox has been vexing researchers and cartographers since its discovery by mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson in 1951.

— sophie weiner, Popular Mechanics, "Why it's Impossible to Accurately Measure a Coastline," 3 Mar. 2018
When Alessandro Masnaghetti, who’s the best cartographer of vineyards, wants to work with us, that says something.

— erik schatzker, Bloomberg.com, "This Ex-Banker Has Wall Street-Sized Ambitions as a Wine Critic," 15 Jan. 2018
Monte’s map is circular, with the North Pole at the center and lines of longitude radiating outward from there—what modern cartographers call a polar azimuthal projection, a very unusual choice for his time.

— National Geographic, "Bizarre, Enormous 16th-Century Map Assembled for First Time," 7 Dec. 2017
Image The map seemed to be an unbelievable find, an unknown fifth original of the rarest of documents, a vision of the world, circa 1507, by the famed German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller.

— michael blanding, New York Times, "Why Experts Don’t Believe This Is a Rare First Map of America," 10 Dec. 2017
Although some cartographers and artists still make fantastic pictorial maps today, the genre never regained its midcentury popularity.

— National Geographic, "Geography Isn’t Sacred in the Playful World of Pictorial Maps," 31 Mar. 2017
The competition was founded in 1993 in honor of American cartographer Barbara Petchenik, who dedicated part of her career to maps related to children’s education.

— betsy mason, National Geographic, "These Amazing Maps Show How Kids See Their Place in the World," 23 May 2017
According to Kate Connolly of The Guardian, the new heart of the EU was determined by French cartographers at IGN, a geographic engineering institute in Paris.

— brigit katz, Smithsonian, "After Brexit, A Tiny German Town Will Become the Center of the EU," 4 May 2017

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'cartographer.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

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."