cart

The root cart traces back to Latin charta, "a leaf of papyrus, a sheet of paper," which itself came from Greek khartes. Before paper as we know it, the ancient world wrote on flattened papyrus reeds — and almost everything important got written on a charta: maps, contracts, official grants. As the word passed through Old French (carte, "card, map") into English, it spread across three connected ideas — paper, what's drawn on paper, and things made of paper.

Paper and what's drawn on it:
- chart — a sheet with a map or diagram on it. A sea chart, a bar chart: information laid out on a flat surface. As a verb, to chart is to map something out.
- charter — a formal document written on a charta: a king's grant, a town's founding rights, an organization's constitution. A charter flight borrows the legal sense (a contract for exclusive hire).
- cartographer — a map-maker: carto- (map, from charta) + graph (draw) + -er (one who).
- cartoon — surprisingly, this once meant a full-size preliminary drawing on stiff paper (Italian cartone, "big paper") that artists made before painting a fresco. Only later did it shift to the humorous sketches and animations we mean today.

Things made of paper or card:
- carton — a box made of cardboard (a milk carton).
- cartridge — a tube or container, originally a rolled paper case holding gunpowder; now an ink cartridge or game cartridge — a replaceable container.

The through-line is the flat sheet of paper. Whether it carries a map, a royal seal, an artist's outline, or it's folded into a box, every cart- word goes back to charta — the original paper.