Cartoon

How to spell cartoon

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cartoon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cartoon mean?

1. nounA simple, often humorous drawing, or an animated film made from such drawings.
2. nounA full-size preparatory drawing made on stout paper for a painting, fresco, or tapestry.

Cartoon in a sentence

• The newspaper runs a political cartoon on its opinion page every morning.

• The gallery displayed a Renaissance cartoon beside the finished fresco it had guided.

• The children watched a Saturday morning cartoon while their parents slept in.

• Conservators carefully unrolled the artist's original cartoon for the tapestry.

Where does cartoon come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This word travelled into English from the Italian cartone, which meant a sheet of stout, heavy paper or pasteboard. Cartone was an augmentative of carta, meaning simply 'paper', and that in turn came from the Latin charta, a sheet of papyrus, ultimately borrowed from the Greek khartes. In Renaissance art a cartone was a full-size preparatory drawing made on that strong paper, which an artist would then transfer onto a wall, panel, or tapestry. English picked the word up in the 1600s for exactly this artistic sense, often passing through the French carton. The familiar modern meaning, a humorous drawing, dates from the 1840s, when the magazine Punch mocked some official competition designs by publishing comic sketches it cheekily called 'cartoons'; the animated film sense followed in the twentieth century. The double 'o' simply reflects the long stressed vowel in the Italian ending.

How the word is built

• cartoon (from Italian cartone: heavy paper, sheet)
• English noun form