maphead
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
Noun[edit]
maphead (plural mapheads)
- (informal) Someone who is particularly interested in maps and geography.
- 1996, R. U. Sirius [pseudonym; Ken Goffman], St. Jude [pseudonym; Jude Milhon], How to Mutate and Take Over the World, New York, N.Y.: Ballantine Books, →ISBN, page 76:
- "Marginalized"? You got an old map, dollikins, and you must be a maphead, and like all mapheads you're scared of the territory, got to get it on paper. Why else would you fondle the concept of "dangerous language"?
- 2011, Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, New York, N.Y. […]: Scribner, →ISBN, page 134:
- In this crowd, you don't have to roll your eyes at Mom when she mentions the geography bee in front of your friends — it's okay to be a maphead.
- 2012, Simon Garfield, On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way It Does, London: Profile Books, →ISBN, page 86:
- The area where the spacecraft landed was called the Fra Mauro Formation, named after the Fra Mauro crater, one of the largest on the moon at 80km across. This didn't quite have the mellifluous ring of Sea of Tranquillity, the site of the first moon landing in 1969, and there is no official record of why members of the International Astronomical Union nominated this particular fifteenth-century Venetian monk as a small but significant addition to its Planetary System Nomenclature. But it may be safe to assume that they were mapheads, and they dug his work.
- 2013 September 28, Douglas J. Johnston, “Map history gets lost in thicket of details”, in Winnipeg Free Press[1], Winnipeg, M.B.: FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 28 April 2024:
- Sometimes the book's appeal goes beyond mapheads (the new term for map lovers). But too often [Timothy] Brook veers off into digressions about historical minutiae that could only be of interest to historical geographers.
References[edit]
- Paul McFedries (1996–2024) “maphead”, in Word Spy, Logophilia Limited.