Word.ws English Dictionary

here be dragons

here be dragons phrase: a fanciful notation, commonly attributed to historical maps, held to indicate either the belief that unknown dangers exist in a certain location on the map, or that actual dragons can be found there.

Phrase

here be dragons

  1. A fanciful notation, commonly attributed to historical maps, held to indicate either the belief that unknown dangers exist in a certain location on the map, or that actual dragons can be found there.
    • It's like in those old maps of the world, where the mapmakers wrote, "Here be dragons" on the unexplored parts of the globe.1994, Steven Henry Strogatz, Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: With Applications To Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering, page 11
    • The awakening world scrawled ‘Here Be Dragons’ across the unknown territory.2004, Nornie Campbell, No Dragons Here, page 253
    Synonyms:
    here be monsters, there be dragons
  2. By extension, used to indicate that which is unknown or uncertain, particularly if it seems to carry some type of risk.
    • Here be dragons in the shape of London landladies, owners of small hotels ('B. & B.') in the streets off the lower end of Euston Road. . .1962, Geoffrey Fletcher, The London Nobody Knows, page 16
    • . . . let me go into what was the unknown, ‘Here-be-Dragons’, hinterland of science, to find out what made scientists tick. . .1987, Ritchie Calder, reported in New Scientist, Vol. 114, No. 1559, May 7, 1987, p. 61

Examples of here be dragons in a sentence

  • Analytical philosophers mark "Here be dragons" on the part of the intellectual map that belongs to phenomenology.1997, William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought, page 191:
  • In undertaking such a task, I realise that I am venturing into uncharted waters, or at least waters for which only charts of the ‘here be dragons’ variety exist.1997, Charles Jones, The Edinburgh history of the Scots language, page 336:

Synonyms of here be dragons

  • here be monsters
  • there be dragons

Origin of here be dragons

Evidence of the use of this term as a notation on actual historical maps is lacking. The only known appearance of an equivalent phrase in any language on a historical map is of Latin HC SVNT DRACONES (“here are dragons”), placed on the east coast of Asia, on the Hunt-Lenox Globe, which dates from c. 1510. The phrase is simply a variation on HIC SVNT LEONES ("here are lions"), the classical phrase used by medieval cartographers to denote unknown territories on maps.

Questions about here be dragons

What does here be dragons mean?
Here be dragons means a fanciful notation, commonly attributed to historical maps, held to indicate either the belief that unknown dangers exist in a certain location on the map, or that actual dragons can be found there.
How do you use here be dragons in a sentence?
Analytical philosophers mark "Here be dragons" on the part of the intellectual map that belongs to phenomenology.
What part of speech is here be dragons?
Here be dragons is a phrase.

Words near here be dragons in the dictionary

  1. herdwide
  2. here
  3. here and now
  4. here and there
  5. here and yonder
  6. here be dragons
  7. here below
  8. here comes the aeroplane
  9. here comes the airplane
  10. here comes the plane
  11. here document

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: here be dragons (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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