Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun An instrument that measures variations in the size of an organ or body part on the basis of the amount of blood passing through or present in the part.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun An instrument for obtaining tracings indicating the changes in the volume of a part of the body, especially as dependent on the circulation of blood in it.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Physiol.) An instrument for determining and registering the variations in the size or volume of a limb, as the arm or leg, and hence the variations in the amount of blood in the limb.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun medicine An instrument for measuring changes in
volume within anorgan or whole body (usually viafluctuations in the amount offluid it contains).
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a measuring instrument for measuring changes in volume of a part or organ or whole body (usually resulting from fluctuations in the amount of blood it contains)
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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A plethysmograph is an instrument that measures physiological arousal.
Same Sex in the City Lauren Levin 2006
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A plethysmograph is an instrument that measures physiological arousal.
Same Sex in the City Lauren Levin 2006
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There's a new technological device out now called the plethysmograph; another variation of it was pioneered by Dr. Gene Able in Atlanta, and in both cases, it's like a sexual lie defector that is used on us that we can't fake out.
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After the parole, after coming out of prison, he would be on that parole, and that parole is really intensive, and they give you polygraphs, they give you this clockwork orangish thing called a plethysmograph where they hook something up to the male's penis and supposedly determine whether they have deviant desires or not.
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Parkview Huntington also has purchased a plethysmograph, which is used to measure lung capacity.
Home 2009
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At a maximum security mental hospital named Coalinga in California, according to an article by the BBC, sex offenders-including "some of the state of California's more serious paedophiles and rapists" - are given a test called a "plethysmograph," which features "a device ... put around the subject's penis to measure his sexual arousal as he's shown a variety of images."
Torontoist 2009
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(Counselors test whether this last treatment is working with a device called a penile plethysmograph, which measures blood flow and arousal.)
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From the link: ..and a form of sexual test called a plethysmograph.
"American taxpayers are funding a lavishly appointed hospital in which hundreds of child molesters and rapists can idle their days away." Ann Althouse 2009
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They were then show videos of straight pornography and gay pornography, while their levels of arousal were measured by a penile plethysmograph.
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There is a lie detector that has a better track record in a limited area: the plethysmograph.
"I understand that there's a deep human impulse to vehemently deny that subliminal messages are effective or even being attempted." Ann Althouse 2008
she commented on the word plethysmograph
It seems as if in the early days this was very uncomfortable, as the plethysmograph was described as "a rigid airtight container enclosing the subject entirely except for (the) head and neck."
July 9, 2008
bilby commented on the word plethysmograph
There was a plethora of these in the early days.
July 9, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word plethysmograph
The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow.
—New York Times, 22 January 2009
January 24, 2009