A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary or index that lists and describes places. Think of it as a reference book organized alphabetically by place names, telling you key facts about each place: where it is, how many people live there, what makes it notable, and other useful information.

Before the internet, gazetteers were essential tools for travelers, students, and anyone trying to locate an unfamiliar town or understand a region. A gazetteer might tell you that Kalamazoo is a city in Michigan with about 75,000 people, or that Mount Kilimanjaro rises 19,341 feet in Tanzania. Some gazetteers focus on a single country, while others cover the whole world.

Today, online mapping services and search engines have largely replaced printed gazetteers, but the term still appears in historical contexts and in some modern geographical databases. Libraries and archives often maintain gazetteers as valuable historical records, showing how places were understood and described in different eras.