Laconic (a.): Using as few words as possible; pithy and concise. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but Martin Elmer’s “Laconic History of the World” map uses a single word to depict thousands of years of history. The Wisconsin-based cartographer created his typographical map “by running all the various countries’ ‘History of _____’ Wikipedia articles through a word cloud, then writing out the most common word to fit into the country’s boundary. The result is thousands of years of human history oversimplified into 100-some words” (source; large version of map here).
“Only the most common word was selected (ignoring the boring stuff, like the name of the country itself). These were then fitted to the country’s boundary using 100% custom vector typography. 176 different counties are represented. Yes, it was tedious” (source). Elmer also created a reader’s companion on his maphugger.com blog to highlight some of the more interesting results:
- 16% of countries had “war” as their most common word, including nearly all of western Europe. and, of course, the USA.
- 25% of all countries had their most common word be a colonial power. Of these, Britain had the most, with 16 countries.
- Nobility goes by different names in different places. 20 countries had either ‘sultan,’ kingdom,’ ‘dynasty,’ or ‘empire.’
- Some countries’ most common word was the name of a neighboring country. Don’t be fooled: “Hungary” is actually Slovakia, “India” is Pakistan. “Ethiopia” is Eritrea, and “Indonesia” is East Timor.
- Very few countries are labeled after the name of their pre-colonial, indigenous population, but there are some exceptions, such as “Maori” and “Berber.”
