Someone whose job is writing down speech as it happens, at full speaking speed, using a shorthand system — a set of quick marks or a special keyboard that records sounds rather than letters — and then producing a typed record of it. The place you meet this most is the courtroom: the court stenographer sits near the judge and makes the official record of every word said. In the past, before recording machines and computers, offices were full of stenographers taking dictation from bosses, and 'stenographer' was one of the standard jobs a young woman might train for; old novels and films are full of them. Today the everyday word in America is 'court reporter', and in Britain people usually say 'shorthand typist' or just 'court reporter'. The job still exists because a trained stenographer is fast and accurate in ways machines still struggle with when several people talk at once. It is a formal word, and a slightly old-fashioned one outside the law.