Perhaps someone asked this already, but I searched the archive and didn’t see it:
What is the origin of the word “cartoon?”
“Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue…” Anon.
I think it’s an Italian word meaning a drawing on paper.
It’s derived from the Italian word cartone, meaning pasteboard. It has several meanings, but the one we’re most used to is “a drawing depicting a humorous situation, ofetn accompanied by a caption.”
When early filmmakers began making motion pictures of series of drawings which seemed to move, they called them “animated cartoons.” Lazy filmgoers dropped the “animated” and just called them cartoons. Even lazier animation lovers of the 90’s shortened it to 'toons.
It’s my duty; my duty as a complete and utter bastard.–Arnold J. Rimmer.
Here’s some more detail for you:
cartoon Cartoon comes via French carton from Italian cartone, which means literally ‘strong heavy paper, pasteboard’ (it was a derivative of carta ‘paper,’ which came from latin charta, source also of English card, carton, chart, and charter). Its meaning was in due course transferred to the preliminary sketches made by artists on such paper, the original and for nearly two centuries the only sense of the word in English: ‘But the sight best pleased me was the cartoons by Raphael, which are far beyond all the painting I ever saw,’ Hatton family correspondence, 1697. Its application to comic drawings in newspapers and magazines began in the 1840s. (Dictionary of Word Origins, John Ayto)
Hmmm!
Well, thank you very much! Now I can go impress my Visual Literacy teacher with my newfound intelligence.
Ah…college…