mimeograph
Americannoun
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a printing machine with an ink-fed drum, around which a cut waxed stencil is placed and which rotates as successive sheets of paper are fed into it.
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a copy made from a mimeograph.
verb (used with object)
noun
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an office machine for printing multiple copies of text or line drawings from an inked drum to which a cut stencil is fixed
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a copy produced by this machine
verb
Other Word Forms
- unmimeographed adjective
Etymology
Origin of mimeograph
Formerly a trademark
Compare meaning
How does mimeograph compare to similar and commonly confused words? Explore the most common comparisons:
Explanation
A mimeograph is an old-fashioned copy machine. Mimeographs were often used for making classroom copies in schools before photocopying became inexpensive in the mid- to late-20th century. A mimeograph printed copies by pressing ink through a stencil onto paper, which was pulled by a crank through a system of rollers. The copies themselves were often also called mimeographs. Even after the invention of modern photocopiers, mimeographs were a popular way to make cheap copies, and many offices still had the machines as late as the 1990s. The root of mimeograph is the Greek mimeisthai, "to mimic, represent, or imitate."
Vocabulary lists containing mimeograph
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Democrats were essentially broke ahead of the 1972 campaign and dependent on an old mimeograph machine.
From Los Angeles Times • Jan. 14, 2024
Steinem remembers the days in which hand-outs and calls to action were made on a primitive duplicating machine called a mimeograph.
From BBC • Dec. 1, 2023
Accept them completely and she’d become a mimeograph.
From Washington Post • Feb. 14, 2023
We wrote exposes of Big Oil’s role in Viet Nam and of the uselessness of smoking banana peels, cranking out copies on our mimeograph machine, selling them for a nickel in the bathrooms at school.
From Salon • Mar. 2, 2019
It still had the smell of the mimeograph machine that it had been printed on.
From "The Red Umbrella" by Christina Gonzalez
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
