Mapping

How to spell mapping

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mapping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mapping mean?

1. nounThe act or process of representing an area, system, or set of relationships in a structured form.
2. nounA rule or function that assigns to each element of one set a corresponding element of another.

Mapping in a sentence

• The survey team finished the mapping of the coastline ahead of schedule.

• The lecturer defined a mapping from the input values to their results.

• Genetic mapping has helped doctors trace inherited conditions.

• The software stores a mapping between each customer code and its address.

Where does mapping come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows directly from the noun 'map', which English took in the sixteenth century from the Latin phrase mappa mundi, literally 'sheet of the world'. The Latin mappa simply meant a napkin, cloth, or signalling sheet, and because early charts of the world were drawn onto cloth, the word for the cloth came to mean the chart itself. By adding the suffix '-ing', English formed a word for the activity of making such charts, and later for any systematic act of laying one set of things over another. The single 'p' of 'map' is doubled before '-ing' under the regular English rule that a short stressed vowel keeps its sound by doubling the final consonant, which is exactly the spot writers slip on. In modern mathematics and computing the same word took on the technical sense of a correspondence or function, while keeping the everyday geographic meaning alive.

How the word is built

• map (root, from Latin mappa: cloth, sheet)
• -p- (consonant doubled after a short stressed vowel)
• -ing (verb/noun suffix)