Earth & SkyGreek → English
Cartography
/kɑːˈtɒɡrəfi/noun
The making of maps.
The Greek roots
χάρτης
chártēs
sheet of papyrus
γράφειν
gráphein
to write, draw
Literally: “papyrus-sheet drawing”
The story of the word
The chartēs of a Greek was blank: a sheet of papyrus, not a map drawn on one. That word travelled into Latin as charta and French as carte, and only when nineteenth-century French geographers built cartographie did the sheet come to mean the map. Chart, charter and card all descend from the same blank page.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
chartchartercartooncard
In a sentence
Military cartography improved faster in four years of war than in the previous century.