Mapped

How to spell mapped

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mapped

What does mapped mean?

1. verbRecorded, charted, or plotted something on a map, or planned it out in detail.

Mapped in a sentence

• The surveyors mapped the entire coastline over a single summer.

• Researchers have mapped every gene in the human genome.

Where does mapped come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of the verb 'map', which itself came from the noun 'map'. The noun traces back to the Latin word mappa, which originally meant a napkin or a cloth signal flag, not a chart at all. In medieval Latin the phrase mappa mundi, literally 'cloth of the world', was used for a drawing of the known world painted on fabric, and over time the single word mappa came to mean the drawing itself. English borrowed it in the sixteenth century, and the noun was soon pressed into service as a verb meaning to record or plan something on a chart. The doubled 'p' in the spelling trap appears because 'map' ends in a single short vowel plus a single consonant, so that consonant doubles before the -ed ending.

How the word is built

• map (chart, plan)
• -ped (doubled consonant before the past-tense suffix -ed)