means An early device that records sound onto a rotating cylinder or disc and plays it back, the ancestor of every record player.

from From Greek phōnē 'sound, voice' (the same root behind 'phone' and 'symphony') plus -graphos 'writing,' from graphein 'to write' — so literally 'sound-writing.' The name fit a machine that scratched the vibrations of a voice into a physical groove, turning speech into something you could read back with a needle. The 'graph' suffix was a 19th-century favorite for new inventions (telegraph, photograph), and 'phonograph' slotted neatly into that family of Greek-built coinages.