recorder

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. One, such as a tape recorder, that makes recordings or records.
2. n. Law A judge who has criminal jurisdiction in a city.
3. n. Music A flute with eight finger holes and a whistlelike mouthpiece.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. One who bears witness; a witness.
2. n. One who records; specifically, a person whose official duty is to register writings or transactions, as the keeper of the rolls of a city, or the like.
3. n. A judge having local criminal jurisdiction in a city or borough.
4. n. A musical instrument of the flageolet family, having a long tube with seven holes and a mouthpiece. In some cases an eighth hole, covered with gold-beaters' skin, appears near the mouthpiece, apparently to influence the quality of the tone. The compass of the instrument was about two octaves. Also record.
5. n. A registering apparatus; specifically, in telegraphy, a receiving instrument in which a permanent record of the signals is made. In the earlier form, as invented by Morse, the record was made by embossing on a ribbon of paper by means of a style fixed to one end of a lever, which carried at the other end the armature of an electromagnet. Several devices for using ink were afterward substituted for the style. In Bain's chemical recorder the dots and dashes were registered by the chemical decomposition of some substance with which the paper was impregnated, the decomposition being produced on the passage of a current of electricity. In Thomson's siphon recorder, used principally on long cable-lines, a fine glass tube bent into the shape of a siphon is attached to the movable part of the receiving instrument, one arm of which dips into a vessel of ink, and the other moves back and forth at right angles to a strip of paper which is regularly moved by clockwork. The electrification of the ink causes it to be projected from the end of the tube in minute drops, so that the movements of the coil are recorded on the slip of paper in very fine dots very near one another. The principal advantage of this instrument is that only a very feeble current is required to give a permanent record of the signals.

Wiktionary

1. n. An apparatus for recording; a device which records.
2. n. Agent noun of record; one who records.
3. n. A judge in a municipal court.
4. n. A simple internal duct flute
5. n. A woodwind musical instrument.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. One who records; specifically, a person whose official duty it is to make a record of writings or transactions.
2. n. The title of the chief judical officer of some cities and boroughs; also, of the chief justice of an East Indian settlement. The Recorder of London is judge of the Lord Mayor's Court, and one of the commissioners of the Central Criminal Court.
3. n. (Mus.), obsolete A kind of wind instrument resembling the flageolet.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a tubular wind instrument with 8 finger holes and a fipple mouthpiece
2. n. someone responsible for keeping records
3. n. equipment for making records
4. n. a barrister or solicitor who serves as part-time judge in towns or boroughs