Other forms: maps, mapping, mapped
A map is a drawing of streets or countries that stops you getting lost. Roads as lines, towns as dots, north at the top.
The word covers paper and screens equally now, and it has spread well beyond geography into a map of the brain, a genetic map, a site map on a website. As a verb, to map something is to record where all its parts are, as in mapping the seabed. Putting a place on the map means making it famous, and off the map means remote enough that nobody bothers to go.
1nounmapA drawing showing the position of places or features.~92%
“She spread the map out on the bonnet.”
2verbrecordTo record or chart the layout of something.~8%
“The team mapped every cave in the system.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
A map is a cloth. Medieval Latin mappa mundī meant napkin of the world, from mappa, a cloth, and mundus, the world, and English kept only the first word of the phrase.
Latin
mappa — napkin, cloth
Medieval Latin
mappa mundī
Old French
mapamonde
Middle English
mappemounde
English, today
map
Built from
Shortening or back-formation of Middle English mappemounde, mapemounde (“world map”), from Old French mapamonde, from Medieval Latin mappa mundī, compound of Latin mappa (“napkin, cloth”) and mundus (“world”). See mop for more on the first component. a doublet of mop and nape and nappe.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA