A gazetteer is a dictionary of geographic identifiers together with their locations and other information.

Gazetteers have traditionally mapped geographic place names (the names of natural features and human constructs) to coordinate-based geographic locations. Digital gazetteers have expanded the notion of “name” to include any identifying ‘label’ for a place or feature: addresses, codes, named events, etc.

While the most common form of indirect georeferencing is through place or feature names, there are many other types of geographic identifiers, including street addresses and postal codes.

Indeed, features do not have to be fixed in space and time. Event gazetteers can hold the footprints of dynamic features such as hurricanes and floods where the temporal dimension of the footprints represents the geographic location during the lifetime of the event.

Did you know? Geocoding is a business geographics term for georeferencing demographic or marketing data. A geocoder is a specialized gazetteer that deals primarily with street addresses: a simple geocoder accepts an address record as input and returns a corresponding geographic position (e.g. latitude and longitude coordinates) that can be added to a base map.