A phonograph is an old machine that plays recorded sound from a disc — what many people now just call a record player. Though actually, the oldest phonographs used a cylinder, not a flat disc; later home machines, and the word in everyday American English, meant the record player in the living room. The word feels old-fashioned now. Younger people say record player, turntable, or vinyl player. You will still meet phonograph in history, museums, and older books. There is also a rare verb, to phonograph something, meaning to record it on such a machine, but almost nobody uses that today. It is not a telephone and not a photograph, even though those words share pieces with it. The machine’s job is sound, not pictures and not phone calls.