Sphygmomanometer

The story of the word

The awkward middle is borrowed whole from manometer, a pressure gauge named from μανός because the earliest ones measured how rarefied a gas had become. Karl von Basch built a usable version in 1881; Scipione Riva-Rocci added the inflatable arm cuff in 1896, and Nikolai Korotkov worked out in 1905 that listening to the artery below the cuff gives both numbers, which is why the tapping sounds carry his name. Before all that, blood pressure had been measured by putting a glass tube directly into a horse's artery.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English

First recorded

19th century