atlas
pronunciation
How to pronounce atlas in British English:
UK [ˈætləs]
How to pronounce atlas in American English:
US [ˈætləs]
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- Noun:
- a collection of maps in book form
- the 1st cervical vertebra
- a figure of a man used as a supporting column
Word Origin
- atlas
- atlas: [16] In Greek mythology, Atlas was a Titan who as a punishment for rebelling against the gods was forced to carry the heavens on his shoulders. Hence when the term was first used in English it was applied to a ‘supporter’: ‘I dare commend him to all that know him, as the Atlas of Poetry’, Thomas Nashe on Robert Greene’s Menaphon 1589. In the 16th century it was common to include a picture of Atlas with his onerous burden as a frontispiece in books of maps, and from this arose the habit of referring to such books as atlases (the application is sometimes said to have arisen specifically from such a book produced in the late 16th century by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512–94), published in England in 1636 under the title Atlas).Atlas also gave his name to the Atlantic ocean. In ancient myth, the heavens were said to be supported on a high mountain in northwestern Africa, represented as, and now named after, the Titan Atlas. In its Greek adjectival form Atlantikós (later Latin Atlanticus) it was applied to the seas immediately to the west of Africa, and gradually to the rest of the ocean as it came within the boundaries of the known world.=> atlantic
- Atlas
- 1580s, Titan, son of Iapetus and Clymene, supposed to uphold the pillars of heaven, which was his punishment for being the war leader of the Titans in the struggle with the Olympian gods. The name in Greek perhaps means "The Bearer (of the Heavens)," from a-, copulative prefix, + stem of tlenai "to bear," from PIE root *tele- "to lift, support, weigh." Mount Atlas, in Mauritania, was important in Greek cosmology as a support of the heavens.
- atlas (n.)
- "collection of maps in a volume," 1636, first in reference to the English translation of "Atlas, sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi" (1585) by Flemish geographer Gerhardus Mercator (1512-1594), who might have been the first to use this word in this way. A picture of the Titan Atlas holding up the world appeared on the frontispiece of this and other early map collections.
Example
- 1. The corresponding map in the atlas itself indicated that significant portions of greenland 's coastline had become ice-free .
- 2. Even the world 's first " atlas " , produced by mercator in 1595 , could go for less than 1 00000 .
- 3. Neuroscientists now have an atlas of which genes are active in the brain
- 4. The atlas ranks cities by the number of pictures taken in their central districts .
- 5. The harpercollins subsidiary collins geo , publisher of the times atlas 's 13th edition , has apologized for the news release and says it is " urgently reviewing " the map of greenland .