cartography

/kɑrˈtɑgrəfi/

Have you ever tried to draw a map of your neighborhood? If you’re drawing your map to scale, taking into account every little hill and valley, you can appreciate the challenge of cartography, the science of making maps.

You may think cartography has gone the way of the dodo bird, now that we’ve got Google maps and GPS devices. You don’t have to draw maps by hand anymore, but you still need cartography skills to turn digital representations into something people can use with ease. While the word cartography dates only from the mid-19th century, maps were around for a long, long time before that. Cartography comes from the French carte, “map,” and -graphie, “writing.”

Definitions of cartography

1. noun

   the making of maps and charts
   synonyms: mapmaking

   type of:

   devising, fashioning, making

   the act that results in something coming to be