Earth & SkyGreek → English
Cosmography
/kɒzˈmɒɡrəfi/noun
The mapping and description of the universe, and of the earth as a part of it.
The Greek roots
κόσμος
kósmos
world, universe
γράφω
gráphō
to write, describe
Literally: “world description”
The story of the word
For the Renaissance sky and earth were one subject: Ptolemy's Geographia sat on the shelf beside his Almagest, and Waldseemüller's Cosmographiae Introductio of 1507 is the book that first printed the name America on a map. The discipline split into astronomy and geography during the seventeenth century, and the word went quiet with it. It survives mostly as lettering on old atlases.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 15th century
Same family
cosmoscosmologygeographymicrocosm
In a sentence
The library keeps a shelf of sixteenth-century cosmographies, half of them wrong in interesting ways.