Some day huge mother ships may guide fleets of long-distance, cargo-carrying airplanes across continents and oceans. “Drones, as the radio-controlled craft are called, have many potentialities, civilian and military. Like many English words, it has its roots in proto-German: dran.ĭrone has been used as a term for UAVs since at least 1946, such as in this Popular Science magazine article: The word is from the Old English dran or dræn.

You’ll see it: when we discuss making maps such as in this article about large frame sensors.ĭJI Phantom 4 is one of the most used and well known drones for aerial mapping.īefore drone meant UAV, drones were male honeybees.

Definition: the science or practice of drawing maps.

Perhaps because (as we’ll see later), the term topography only began to be used well after Brazil was colonised. Agrimensor is only used in Brazil: in Portugal the preferred term is topógrafo.

Agrimensors were also called gromatici as they carried a groma or gruma, the precursor of a modern surveyor’s rod, strung with plumb lines to measure lines and angles and build an empire. The word is taken directly from the Latin: agrimensor also meant “surveyor” in Ancient Rome. In Brazilian Portuguese, agrimensor doesn’t mean agronomist, but surveyor. We reach agronomy from the Greek agronomos, meaning “overseer of land.” Nomos meant 'law or custom, administering.' So the modern “science of soil management and crop production” comes from the ancient “law of the land.” The root ag has grown into words as diverse as acorn, peregrine and pilgrim.

It shares a link with the Sanskrit ajaras (meaning “plain” or “open country”) and the Greek agros (which you’ve already guessed means “field”, as does the Latin ager, the Old English æcer and the Gothic akrs) from where we derive the word acre. It’s a Proto-Indo-European root meaning 'field' - which is probably already a derivative of the root ag, which means to “drive, draw out or move.” Precision agriculture coupled with advanced machinery improves farming techniques and methods, saving money and resources.Īgro is the sort of ancient term which excites etymologists.

Drone definition technology