Definitions

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

  • noun A record player; a phonograph.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An instrument for permanently recording and reproducing sounds by means of a tracing made on the principle of the phonautogram and etched into some solid material.

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

  • noun obsolescent An instrument for recording, preserving, and reproducing sounds, the record being a tracing of a phonautograph etched in some solid material. Reproduction is accomplished by means of a system attached to an elastic diaphragm. This older term is almost completely replaced for modern devices by the word phonograph (or hi-fi), and technological changes have made the term sound antiquated, and it is usually used to refer to older non-electronic versions of the phonograph.

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

  • noun UK, dated A historic wind-up record player that acoustically reproduces sound from a disk rather than a cylinder record.

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

  • noun an antique record player; the sound of the vibrating needle is amplified acoustically

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Originally a trademark.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Gramophone ("a trademark"), coined by Emile Berliner after the invention of the first phonograph, from Ancient Greek γράμμα (gramma, "letter") and φωνή (fone, "sound").

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Examples

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  • "Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City." Joyce, Ulysses, 15

    January 1, 2008