Cartoonist
nounA person who draws cartoons, comic strips, or animated characters, often for newspapers, magazines, or studios.
How to spell cartoonist
10 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce cartoonist
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does cartoonist mean?
- nounA person who draws cartoons, comic strips, or animated characters, often for newspapers, magazines, or studios.
Cartoonist in a sentence
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The newspaper hired a political cartoonist to comment on the budget.
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As a freelance cartoonist, she sold strips to several magazines.
Where does cartoonist come from?
Language of origin: Italian
This word is built from 'cartoon' plus the agent suffix '-ist', which marks a person who does a particular thing. 'Cartoon' itself came into English in the 1600s from the Italian cartone, an augmentative of carta meaning 'paper', so cartone literally meant 'big sheet of paper' or 'pasteboard'. Artists originally used such large sheets to sketch full-scale preliminary designs for paintings, frescoes, and tapestries, and that working drawing was the first 'cartoon'. By the nineteenth century, and especially through the satirical drawings in the magazine Punch, the sense shifted to the humorous or political sketch we picture today. The 'one who draws cartoons' meaning, and thus 'cartoonist', settled in during the later 1800s. The spelling trap is the doubled 'oo' from 'cartoon' followed by the clean '-ist', not '-est'.
How the word is built
- cartoon (from Italian cartone: a large sheet of paper)
- -ist (one who practises or does something)
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