Cartoon: From a Painter's Sketch to a Saturday Morning

A cartoon today is a funny drawing or an animated film. For four centuries it meant something else entirely: the full-size working drawing an artist made on heavy paper before committing to a fresco or tapestry.

• A humorous drawing. *A political cartoon on the front page.*
• An animated film. *The children watched cartoons all morning.*
• A comic strip. *A daily newspaper cartoon.*
• A preparatory drawing (art). *Raphael's cartoons for the Sistine tapestries.*

Word forms

How it is used in a sentence

• The cartoon caused a diplomatic row.Political cartoons regularly do.
• His villain was almost cartoonish.Exaggerated to the point of not being believable.
• The cartoons were transferred to the wall by pricking and pouncing.The original art sense — dots of charcoal through pinholes.

How the meaning shifted

• The word entered English in the seventeenth century for a full-size preparatory drawing
• In 1843 the magazine Punch mocked a competition of grand designs by publishing joke drawings and calling them cartoons
• The joke stuck, and the humorous sense took over the word within a generation
• Animation adopted it in the twentieth century, and the art sense survives only in galleries

From Italian *cartone*, big paper, from *carta*, paper. The material gave the word its name, which is why a piece of stiff card and a satirical drawing share an ancestor.