Cartography

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /kɐː(ɹ)ˈtɔɡɹəfɪi̯/

Definitions

1. The science and art of creating maps and charts to represent geographical areas, spatial relationships, and territorial features
2. The practice of designing and producing visual representations of Earth's surface or celestial bodies that depict geographical features, political boundaries, and spatial relationships through drawn or printed media
3. The discipline of constructing and interpreting visual representations of geographical terrain, political divisions, and spatial features through systematic surveying and graphic design techniques

Etymology: "Cartography" is a compound built from two Greek-derived pieces: "carto-", meaning map, and "-graphy", meaning writing or recording. The first piece traces back to Ancient Greek "khártēs", a word for a papyrus sheet or leaf, which came to mean a map. It passed into Latin and then French as "carte", and the English word was formed from French "cartographie" with the same meaning as the Greek sense that remained: drawing or writing a map. The second part, "-graphy", comes from Greek "gráphō", to write. It turns up across English in words for a kind of writing or recording, such as "geography" (earth-writing) and "photography" (light-writing). So the word is literally a map-writing, a name that describes the act of setting the land down on paper.

Synonyms: mapmaking, charting