There's been a huge amount of linguistic drift around that word over the centuries. "Cartoon" has been around since 1670, when all it referred to was an artist's preliminary sketch on pasteboard or other heavy paper (said paper being "carton" in Italian and French). It wasn't until 1843 that the word came to refer to drawings in newspapers and magazines, and even then they were mostly used to parody or support political issues and personalities. Purely comedic cartoons came later, with "comic" eventually being used with many types of static cartooning, even those that aren't funny at all like crime, horror and superhero comic books and strips.
"Animated cartoons" weren't a thing until 1911 (when Windsor McKay's static cartoons were first animated), and it took decades before the "animated" preface faded away in common usage. There were also competing terms like cel animation, although they were too technical to win the popularity cotest that evolving language generally is. These days "cartoon" generally implies animated media but there are still cases (the political cartoon form, for example) where "comic" hasn't taken over when referring to static cartoon imagery. "Toon" is a further extension of the drift, and owes part of its popularity to Loony Tunes' continuing popularity reinforcing the natural tendency toward shortening words over time.
Also worth noting that not all animation involves actual cartooning. For ex, stop motion animation and its subcategory claymation are rarely called cartoons, and arguably shouldn't be.
Yes, I did do several papers on this stuff in my long-ago college days.