Definitions

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

  • noun A device for measuring the work capacity of a muscle or group of muscles during contraction.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An instrument for recording muscular work; a recording dynamometer or ergometer: used especially in the study of muscular fatigue.

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

  • noun An instrument for measuring and recording the work done by a single muscle or set of muscles, the rate of fatigue, etc.

Etymologies

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

[Greek ergon, work; see werg- in Indo-European roots + –graph.]

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Examples

  • We can step inside, harness our middle finger to the ergograph, lift it up and down forty-five times in ninety seconds, and lo!

    Civics and Health William H. Allen

  • The annual report of a board of health should give as clear a picture of a community's health during the past week or past quarter as the ergograph gives of the pupils mentioned on page 126.

    Civics and Health William H. Allen

  • Perhaps the time will come when science and commerce will supply every tintype photographer with an ergograph and the knowledge to use it.

    Civics and Health William H. Allen

  • Then we shall hear at summer resorts and fairs, "Your ergograph on a postal card, three for a quarter."

    Civics and Health William H. Allen

  • As with strength of grip, so with endurance as measured by the ergograph; boys surpass girls at all ages, and this differentiation becomes very marked after the age of fourteen, after which age girls increase in strength and endurance but very slightly, while after fourteen boys acquire almost exactly half of the total power in these two features which they acquire in the first twenty years of life.

    Civics and Health William H. Allen

  • If the arm lifts the weight of an ergograph until the will cannot overcome the fatigue, the mere seeing of the movement carried out by others whips the motor centers to new efficiency.

    Introduction to the Science of Sociology Robert Ezra Park 1926

  • The one scientific instrument it seemed possible to use was an ergograph, a complicated and expensive instrument kindly lent to us from the physiological laboratory of the University of Chicago.

    Twenty Years at Hull-House, With Autobiographical Notes 1910

  • It now relies on purely psychological tests for its researches, and although it does not exclude the methods adopted in the laboratory, and the use of such accurate and trustworthy instruments as the esthesiometer and the ergograph, the school itself has become the chief field of experiment.

    Spontaneous Activity in Education Maria Montessori 1911

  • This has been clearly determined, for instance, by Féré, in the course of a long and elaborate series of experiments dealing with the various influences that modify work as measured by Mosso's ergograph.

    Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women Havelock Ellis 1899

  • Féré has shown that the slight stimulus to the skin furnished by placing a piece of metal on the arm or elsewhere suffices to increase the output of work with the ergograph.

    Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 Sexual Selection In Man Havelock Ellis 1899

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