Definitions

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

  • noun An instrument for graphically recording the form, strength, and variations of the arterial pulse.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An instrument which, when applied over an artery, traces on a piece of paper moved by clockwork a curve which indicates the changes of tension of the blood within.

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

  • noun (Physiol.) An instrument which, when applied over an artery, indicates graphically the movements or character of the pulse. See sphygmogram.

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

  • noun medicine a mechanical device used to measure blood pressure and pulse

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

sphygmo- (“pulse”) + -graph

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Examples

  • As a student she constructed a sphygmograph for recording the pulse in arteries.

    Hertha Ayrton.

  • Times with numerous plates of sphygmograph tracings (I write subject to correction) and an admirable new terminology, that did the thing for him.

    The Food of the Gods and how it came to Earth

  • Dr. Johnson holds the opinion that a pen in the hand of a writer serves, in a modified degree, the same end as the needle in the first-named form of the sphygmograph and that in such a person's handwriting one can see by projecting the letters, greatly magnified, on a screen, the scarcely perceptible turns and quivers made in the lines by the spontaneous action of that person's peculiar pulsation.

    Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine

  • Such a chart is obtained for medical purposes by means of a sphygmograph, an instrument fitted to the patient's forearm and supplied with a needle, which can be so arranged as to record automatically on a prepared sheet of paper the peculiar force and frequency of the pulsation.

    Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine

  • The deacon says that, wonderful as the sphygmograph is, the pulse itself is more wonderful still -- a fact which no good ST.

    St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878

  • There's a great deal going on in the world that you and I know very little about; but such things as the sphygmograph give us a hint of the achievements of science in its efforts to help God's children out of their many ills and pains.

    St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878

  • I am only a Jack-in-the-Pulpit, you know, quite dependent upon what the birds and other bipeds tell me, so you cannot expect a full description and explanation of the sphygmograph here.

    St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878

  • He finds time to contribute to the _Atlantic Monthly_ pieces of styptic prose that make zigzags on the sphygmograph of the editor.

    Shandygaff

  • Marey (b. 1830; blood pressure, mechanism of the heart and the invention of the sphygmograph).

    The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 10: Mass Music-Newman

  • Such a chart is obtained for medical purposes by means of a sphygmograph, an instrument fitted to the patient's forearm and supplied with a needle, which can be so arranged as to record automatically on

    The Silent Bullet

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