cartoon

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A drawing depicting a humorous situation, often accompanied by a caption.
• noun A drawing representing current public figures or issues symbolically and often satirically.
• noun A preliminary sketch similar in size to the work, such as a fresco, that is to be copied from it.
• noun A usually short, animated movie or television program.
• noun An animated character in a movie or television program.
• noun A comic strip.
• noun A ridiculously oversimplified or stereotypical representation.
• intransitive verb To draw a humorous or satirical representation of; caricature.
• intransitive verb To make humorous or satirical drawings.

from The Century Dictionary.

• In painting, to make a working design.
• To caricature or ridicule by a cartoon; make the subject of a cartoon.
• noun In art, a design of the same size as an intended decoration or pattern to be executed in fresco, mosaic, or tapestry, and transferred from the strong paper on which it is usually drawn either by cutting out the figure and outlining it on the surface to be decorated with a sharp point, or, in the case of a composition, by pricking, and pouncing with a bag of muslin filled with charcoal-dust.
• noun A picture, either a caricature or a symbolical composition, designed to advocate or attack some political or other idea of present interest or some prominent person: as, the cartoons of “Punch.”
• noun Sometimes written carton.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun A design or study drawn of the full size, to serve as a model for transferring or copying; -- used in the making of mosaics, tapestries, fresco pantings and the like.
• noun A large pictorial sketch, as in a journal or magazine; esp. a pictorial caricature
• noun same as comic strip.
• noun a motion picture consisting of a series of frames, each being a photograph of a drawing rather than a frame produced by filming a scene of true action, and in which the objects are displaced slightly in succeeding frames so as to give the appearance of motion when projected as a motion picture on the screen. The types of characters portrayed in such films are often similar or identical to those in a comic strip.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun comics A humorous drawing, often with a caption, or a strip of such drawings.
• noun comics A drawing satirising current public figures.
• noun art An artist's preliminary sketch.
• noun animation An animated piece of film which is often but not exclusively humorous.
• noun A diagram in a scientific concept.
• verb art, comics, animation To draw a cartoon.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a humorous or satirical drawing published in a newspaper or magazine
• noun a film made by photographing a series of cartoon drawings to give the illusion of movement when projected in rapid sequence
• verb draw cartoons of