1794 S. T. Coleridge Let. 17 Dec. in Lett. (1895) 117 The move of bepraising a man by enumerating the beauties of his polygraph is at least an original one.

1795 H. Cowley Town before You ii. ii. 18 The resemblance is astonishing—they call you his polygraph.

1797 M. Robinson Walsingham IV. lxxi. 10 A polygraph is a fellow that apes one's dress and manners.

1812 J. K. Paulding Let. 5 Sept. in P. M. Irving Life & Lett. Washington Irving (1864) I. xviii. 285 Inskeep says it is the joint production of Parson Mason and his Polygraph Bristed.

1803 C. W. Peale in Poulson's Amer. Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia) 3 Oct. 3/2 Viewing a happy contrivance of the ingenious Mr. John J. Hawkins for multiplying copies of writing, or rather, making several originals at the same time..I instantly urged him to get a patent for his invention..and..he designates this under the name of Polygraph.

1829 C. Mackenzie Five Thousand Receipts (new ed.) 394 To frame a polygraph, or instrument for writing two letters at once.

a1884 E. H. Knight Pract. Dict. Mech. Suppl. 700/2 Polygraph, one of the names given to the gelatine copying pad.

1924 P. Wilstach Jefferson & Monticello (1925) vii. 110 In addition to the usual writing materials it [sc. a table] held his polygraph, so that..he could write letters with automatic duplicate copies.

2002 P. Blom To have & to Hold (2003) 92 He [sc. Peale] patented steam baths, bridge designs and a polygraph, which allowed him to copy documents.

1871 Lancet 25 Nov. 739/1 The most direct method for recording the heart's motion is that which we owe to Chauveau and Marey. These ingenious experimenters have supplied us with many instruments adapted for the registration of movements, but none more generally useful than the following, which has been well named the ‘polygraph’.

1876 A. Ransome Stethometry vi. 126 A tube, placed in the trachea of a recently killed dog, is made to communicate with the drum of a polygraph.

1905 H. D. Rolleston Dis. Liver 93 J. Mackenzie has made an exhaustive study of hepatic pulsation by means of the polygraph, a modification of the cardiograph.

1923 J. A. Larson in Jrnl. Exper. Psychol. 6 424 A deception test based upon the correlation between the physiological and emotional activities... The technique consists of securing a continuous blood pressure curve (secured by an Erlanger sphygmomanometer or more preferably by a modification of the McKenzie or the Jacquet polygraphs) taken synchronously with a respiratory and a timing curve.

1942 F. E. Inbau Lie Detection i. 5 Until 1939 the Keeler Polygraph consisted only of the blood pressure-pulse-respiration units.

1959 M. Dolinsky There is no Silence iii. 47 Anxiety causes subtle and involuntary increases in the heartbeat, respiration,..and blood pressure which the polygraph records.

1971 Nature 9 July 124/2 Instantaneous blood flows to the two hindlimbs..were displayed on a ‘Grass P7’ polygraph together with the instantaneous and mean (integrated) blood pressure.

1996 Focus Apr. 67/4 Some experts claim polygraphs can be around 80 to 90 per cent effective in spotting liars.

2004 Human Reproduction 19 81 Intrauterine pressure was recorded using a Grass polygraph connected to a pressure transducer.

1799 A. Plumptre tr. F. Matthisson Lett. xvii. 208 He, with less than a hundred pages, travels much more securely on the road to immortality, that the Polygraph [Ger. Polygraph] of Ferney with his seventy volumes.

1854 A. G. Henderson tr. V. Cousin Philos. Kant i. 8 Leibnitz..was led away by a passion for universal knowledge... Wolf endeavoured to bring all the scattered views of the great polygraph to a common centre.

1883 Cent. Mag. 6 251 M. Jules Claretie, most prolific of polygraphs, has..added another novel to his already long list.

1922 I. Goldberg Brazilian Lit. ii. viii. 252 Verissimo..has defined the qualities of the prolific polygraph.

1961 W. M. Frohock Strangers to this Ground iv. 64 He is less a critic than a polygraph,..an essayist notable chiefly for writing knowledgeably on an amazing variety of subjects.

1995 T. James Dream, Creativity & Madness 279 Diderot Denis (1713–84), philosopher, polygraph, and main inspiration behind the Encyclopédie.

1882 Ogilvie's Imperial Dict. (new ed.) III. 484/3 Polygraph,..a collection of different works written either by one or by different authors.

1895 Science 29 Mar. 360/1 The author of this polygraph of 31 pages.

1893 Science 13 Oct. 207 A vast variety of digraphs, trigraphs, and even polygraphs to represent the different sounds.

1943 L. D. Smith Cryptogr. iv. 82 A method that represents a distinct departure from Vignère's..is found in polygraph substitution—that is, the substitution of cipher digraphs or trigraphs for the plain-text digraphs or trigraphs.

1974 Encycl. Brit. Macropædia V. 332/1 In substitution ciphers, the characteristic relative frequencies of single letters, digraphs, and longer polygraphs serve as a basis for the assignment of plaintext equivalents to cipher values.

1997 I. Nerent in C. A. Perfetti Learning to Spell iii. xi. 209 A polygraphic consonant in the target can inhibit its competitor in the mask, but the mask's polygraph cannot inhibit the target because the mask is a nonword.