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Diaphragm   /dˈaɪəfrˌæm/   Listen
Diaphragm

noun
1.
A mechanical device in a camera that controls size of aperture of the lens.  Synonym: stop.
2.
(anatomy) a muscular partition separating the abdominal and thoracic cavities; functions in respiration.  Synonym: midriff.
3.
A contraceptive device consisting of a flexible dome-shaped cup made of rubber or plastic; it is filled with spermicide and fitted over the uterine cervix.  Synonyms: contraceptive diaphragm, pessary.
4.
Electro-acoustic transducer that vibrates to receive or produce sound waves.



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"Diaphragm" Quotes from Famous Books



... and buildings used by the enemy, unscrew the earphone of telephone receivers and remove the diaphragm. Electricians and telephone repair men can make poor connections and damage insulation so that cross talk and other kinds of electrical interference will make conversations hard ...
— Simple Sabotage Field Manual • Strategic Services

... delicate, the intermediate thick and at length tough, coriaceous, and resistant. When first formed, the peridia are spherical, they then elongate and expand, the mouth being for some time closed by a veil, or diaphragm, which ultimately disappears. Within the cups lentil-shaped bodies are attached to the base and sides by elastic cords. These are the sporangia. Each of these has a complicated structure; externally there is a filamentous tunic, composed of interlaced fibres, sometimes called the ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... I am not sure, indeed, that he greatly disagreed with the Chinese, who held that the soul lies in the abdomen. The Greeks at all events were right, he thought, who employed the same words for the mind and the diaphragm. (*1) By this I do not mean to insinuate a charge of gluttony, or indeed any other serious charge to the prejudice of the metaphysician. If Pierre Bon-Bon had his failings—and what great man has not a thousand?—if ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... replied the vicomte. "Has Mazarin published an edict forbidding a man to move his diaphragm? You know ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... three boys mounted the stairs to the floor above in silence—save for a belated giggle on the part of Verman, which was restrained upon a terrible gesture from Penrod. Verman buried his mouth as deeply as possible in a ragged sleeve, and confined his demonstrations to a heaving of the stomach and diaphragm. ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington

... by which this is provided is the "vagus" nerve. This nerve passes out of the cerebral region as a portion of the voluntary system, and through it we control the vocal organs; then it passes onwards to the thorax sending out branches to the heart and lungs; and finally, passing through the diaphragm, it loses the outer coating which distinguishes the nerves of the voluntary system and becomes identified with those of the sympathetic system, so forming a connecting link between the two and making the man physically a ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... of diaphragmatic breathing in accordance with his anatomical knowledge. It consists in restoring the breath, without effort, from the commencing lift of the diaphragm to the production of the tone. He opposed it to the costal breathing, which brings the lungs suddenly into action by movements of the chest and shoulders, and causes extreme fatigue. "The chest," he says, "should be a passive agent; the larynx and mouth, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... the cause of the change in the color of sunlight, we can make an artificial sunset, in which we have an imitation light passing through increasing thicknesses of air largely charged with water particles. [The image of a circular diaphragm placed in front of the electric light was thrown on the screen in imitation of the sun, and a cell containing hyposulphite of soda placed in the beam. Hydrochloric acid was then added; as the fine ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various

... in order that, by the night train, they may get to New York on the 22d, to have once a year a square meal. From 1620 down to the opening of New York to their settlement, a constantly increasing void was growing inside the Yankee diaphragm, and even now the native and imported Yankee finds the best-appointed restaurant in the world sufficient for his wants; and he has migrated to this house, that he may annually have the sensation of sufficiency in the largest hotel in the ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser

... the voice of the person sending the spoken message, the electric current along the wire, acted upon by the microphone in the transmitter, increases or decreases. This increasing and decreasing current acts on a thin metal disc or diaphragm in the receiver which is held to the ear of the ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner

... through, [Greek: luein], to loosen), in chemistry, a process invented by Thomas Graham for separating colloidal and crystalline substances. He found that solutions could be divided into two classes according to their action upon a porous diaphragm such as parchment. If a solution, say of salt, be placed in a drum provided with a parchment bottom, termed a "dialyser," and the drum and its contents placed in a larger vessel of water, the salt will pass through the membrane. If the salt solution be replaced ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... stuff is now called alcohol, and none so low that he has a good word for it. Quite right, I am certain. I don't defend it. Alcohol, they are saying to-day, if taken in sufficient quantities, tears all the outer coating off the diaphragm. It leaves the epigastric tissue, so I ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock

... iron hand seemed round his body just on a level with the diaphragm; this seemed growing tighter, and the tighter it grew the more difficult it was to breathe. The fracture had been very high up, but he knew nothing of this; he knew that his back was broken, and that men with broken backs die, but he did ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... Medical, went down on one patella. His heart (a hollow muscular pump) was driving blood from its ventricles as it had never yet driven it in all its twenty-five years of incessant labour. Further, by flattening the arch of his diaphragm and elevating his ribs and sternum, Charles was increasing the cavity of his thorax and taking in air. Immediately the diaphragm and the sternum and costal cartilages relaxed again the air escaped. The lungs of Charles were ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various

... there are two methods of inhaling and expelling the air from the lungs. One is by means of the rising and falling of the ribs. This is called "the costal method." The other is by the contraction and distention of the midriff or diaphragm. The diaphragm is the movable floor to the thorax or box that encloses the lungs. This is called "the diaphragmatic method." Now, since God has furnished us with both methods, He evidently intended that we should use both, as we use our two eyes or our two ears. They are given, ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan

... deep mellow laugh, starting from the bottom of his diaphragm, swelling as it passed through his chest, swelling again as it passed through throat and mouth, and bursting upon the open air in a mighty diapason that rose cheerfully above the shrieking and moaning of ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler

... BREATHE IT. 1. Where are your lungs? 2. Draw a picture of the ribs. 3. In what position are they when the lungs are filled with air? In what position is the diaphragm then? 4. What are the lungs giving off in the breath besides carbon dioxid? How can you prove this? 5. How can you prove that the gas in your breath is not like the gas in the fresh air around you? 6. Why does a room with people in it grow very warm if the doors and ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson

... the illustrious son of Evaemon, perceived pressed hard with many darts, advancing he stood beside him, and took aim with his shining spear; and smote Apisaon, son of Phausias, shepherd of the people, in the liver, under the diaphragm; and immediately relaxed his limbs. And when godlike Alexander observed him stripping off the armour of Apisaon, he instantly bent his bow against Eurypylus, and smote him with an arrow upon the right thigh; and the reed was broken, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer

... layer hangs loosely around the heart and is continuous with the inner layer at the top. The outer layer also connects at certain places with the membranes surrounding the lungs and is attached below to the diaphragm. Between the two layers of the pericardium is secreted a liquid which prevents friction from the ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.

... this morning, having taken some medicine, which has removed the strange and aching feeling in my back and breast. I believe it is from the diaphragm; it must be looked to, however. I have not yet breakfasted, yet have cleared half my day's work holding it at the ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... It consisted of a miniature head- telephone, connected to a small, metallic case the size of a cigar-box, the cover of which was a transparent diaphragm. Estra did not open the case, but showed the ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint

... chromospheric ring, with whatever trees or fountains of fire chance to be at the moment issuing from it, has been accomplished by a very simple device. The disc of the sun itself having been screened with a circular metallic diaphragm, it is only necessary to cause the slit to traverse the virtually eclipsed luminary, in order to get an impression of the whole round of its fringing appendages. And the record can be extended to the disc by removing the screen, and ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... Diaphragm: any thin dividing membrane; that thin membrane separating the cavity containing the heart from the rest of ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith

... occupation and surroundings are such that one cannot indulge in such active pastimes, or where the time for such exercises is necessarily limited, frequent voluntary deep-breathing exercises can be highly commended. About the best example of the proper use of the diaphragm and the natural movement of the abdominal and dorsal region in correct breathing is illustrated in a small child. In nearly all cases an active healthy child will breathe properly, and by studying the movement ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden

... the special features in connection with Mr. Greenwood's new departure is the novel and ingenious method by which the electrolyzed products are separated, and their recombination rendered impossible. This object is attained by the use of a specially constructed diaphragm which is composed of a series of V-shaped glass troughs, fitted in a frame within each other with a small space between them, which is lightly packed with asbestos fiber. Another important feature of the apparatus is a compound anode which consists ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various

... the repeating diaphragm and started the motor once more. There were two or three squeaks and then an ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye

... of this battery is that the electrolyte is not employed as a mobile liquid, but in a quasi-solid form, and it is, therefore, named dry gas battery. It consists of a number of elements, which are formed of a porous diaphragm of a non-conducting material (in this instance plaster of Paris), which is impregnated with dilute sulphuric acid. Both sides of this diaphragm are covered with very fine platinum leaf perforated with very numerous small holes, and over this a thin film of platinum black. Both these ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various

... again the strain of muscle and joint in passing the heavy dish? Can I feel the movement of the jaws in chewing the beefsteak? Of the throat and lips in talking? Of the chest and diaphragm in laughing? Of the muscles in sitting and rising? In hand and arm in using knife and fork and spoon? Can I get again the sensation of pain which accompanied biting on a tender tooth? From the shooting of a drop of acid from ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts

... possible, to a crushing "right" or "left" to the point of the jaw or the pit of the stomach. His proficiency in the manly art was polished and thorough and bespoke earnest application. The last doubting Thomas to be convinced came to five minutes after his diaphragm had been rudely and suddenly raised several inches by a low right hook, and as he groped for his bearings and got his wind back again he asked, very feebly, where "Kansas" was; ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various

... swimming near the other side, which was about two hundred yards distant from us. Our native crew manned the boat, and rescued her; when brought on board, she was found to have an arrow-head, eight or ten inches long, in her back, below the ribs, and slanting up through the diaphragm and left lung, towards the heart—she had been shot from behind when stooping. Air was coming out of the wound, and, there being but an inch of the barbed arrow-head visible, it was thought better not to run the risk of her dying under the operation necessary ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... when with his teeth he had lengthened out the parchment whereon he wrote the tittle-tattle of two young mangy whores. By this inconvenient the cotyledons of her matrix were presently loosed, through which the child sprang up and leaped, and so, entering into the hollow vein, did climb by the diaphragm even above her shoulders, where the vein divides itself into two, and from thence taking his way towards the left side, issued forth at her left ear. As soon as he was born, he cried not as other babes use to do, Miez, miez, miez, miez, but with a high, sturdy, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... bed he began to laugh. It was his laughter that waked me. By the time I was wide awake the laughter sounded very ugly, and by the time I got to him it was mixed with awful sobs that came all the way from his diaphragm and seemed as if they were going to tear him to pieces. I turned on the light, but the moment I saw his face I turned it off. It isn't decent for one man to see another have hysterics. We haven't spoken of the thing since, but he knows that I came ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris

... good deal of attention, not all of it pleasant, on the part of Friedrich. From the first he had, as usual, been a most clear-eyed observer of everything; and found the business, as appears, not of tragical nature, but of expensive-farcical, capable to shake the diaphragm rather than touch the heart of a reflective on-looker. He has a considerable Poem on it,—WAR OF THE CONFEDERATES by title (in the old style of the PALLADION, imitating an unattainable JEANNE D'ARC),—considerable Poem, now forming itself at leisure in his thoughts, ["LA GUERRE ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... "are from the compressing of the womb. Don't let them frighten you—everything is just as it should be. You will find that you can help at each pang by holding your breath; just as soon as you cry out, it releases the diaphragm, and the pressure stops, and the pain passes. You must bear each one just as long as you can. I don't want you to faint, of course—but the longer the pressure lasts, the sooner it ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... esophagus and to threaten the larynx with disruption, until relief was found in a wide-throated peal that subsided in a second series of small explosions and gradually rumbled off into silence somewhere in the region of the diaphragm, leaving only the wrinkles about the corners of the blue eyes as a kind of warning that the whole process might be repeated upon sufficient provocation. "Yes, we got him ordained," he repeated when the chuckle had passed. "I was glad of your explanatory note ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor

... elocution was an eccentric old gentleman named North. The boys paid little attention to him and were disposed to ridicule his peculiarities. He saw that I was specially anxious to learn and said: "The principal thing about oratory is to use your diaphragm instead of your throat." His lesson on that subject has been of infinite benefit to ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew

... somewhat. Gwynplaine heard close to him a noise of which only a Chinese gong could give an idea; something like a blow struck against the diaphragm of the abyss. It was the wapentake striking his wand against ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... emotional. In these children every burst of crying, however produced, whether by a fall, by a fright, by the entrance of a stranger, or by a visit to a doctor, is apt to be ushered in by a long period of apnoea, due to spasm of the glottis and of the diaphragm. The first few expirations are not followed by any inspiration. For several seconds the silence may be complete, while the child steadily becomes more and more cyanosed, or the body may be shaken by incomplete expiratory movements and strangled cries which are suppressed ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron

... by wasting without replenishment. Such a condition is always negative, and requires treatment under the negative pole. On the contrary, relaxed parts, such as appear in prolapsus uteri, and in the sagging down of the diaphragm, with the thoracic and abdominal viscera, exhibit no lack of nutrition or of vital action. Relaxation is a loosening of atoms from each other, more or less, without loss of aggregate weight; and implies a condition electrically positive in excess, and calls ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark

... transmitter for this purpose is a plane mirror of flexible material, silvered mica or microscope glass. Against the back of this mirror my voice is directed. In the carbon transmitter of the telephone a variable electrical resistance is produced by the pressure on the diaphragm, based on the fact that carbon is not as good a conductor of electricity under pressure as when not. Here, the mouthpiece is just a shell supporting a thin metal diaphragm to which the mirror on the back is attached, an ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve

... convulsive motion of the diaphragm and parts adjacent. The common causes are flatuency, indigestion, acidity and worms. It may usually be removed by the exhibition of warm carminatives, cordials, cold wafer, weak spirits, camphor julep, or spirits of sal volatile. A sudden fright or surprise ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs

... is about thirty feet long. Its first part, the mouth, opens back of the tongue into the throat, named the pharynx. This leads into a tube, the gullet, passing down through the back part of the chest into the stomach below the diaphragm. The stomach is a bent sac opening into a tube over twenty-five feet long called the bowels or intestines. This tube is folded into a bunch which fills a large part of ...
— Health Lessons - Book 1 • Alvin Davison

... found that it is possible to receive wireless signals, although ordinary records are not loud enough, by using a small microphone on the repeating diaphragm and connected with a loud- speaking telephone. The chief difficulty was to get a microphone that would carry a sufficient current without burning up. There were other difficulties, but they have been surmounted and now wireless telegraph messages may ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve

... passed, that I did take cognizance of strange sights and singular people, that I did act much as persons act from the ordinary promptings of curiosity, and from time to time even laugh very nearly as those do who are attacked with a convulsive sense of the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the diaphragm. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various

... accurate than CAMPER; but he has equally omitted to assign any purpose to so strange a formation, contenting himself with observing that the structure is a peculiarity, and that one of the remarkable folds nearest the orifice of the diaphragm appears to act as a valve, so that the portion beyond may be considered as an appendage similar to that of the ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... breathing is due, not to anything wrong with lungs or windpipe, but to failure in the diaphragm (or large muscular "floor" of the chest), and the other chest muscles, which work the lungs. A feeling of sinking and weakness round the waist indicates in such a case diaphragm failure. Gentle heat at the small of the back, and olive ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... respiratory muscles. Such forced or labored breathing is a common symptom in serious lung diseases, "bloat" in cattle, or any condition that may cause dyspnoea. Horses affected with "heaves" show a double contraction of the muscles in the region of the flank during expiration. In spasm of the diaphragm or "thumps" the expiration appears to be a short, jerking movement of the flank. In the abdominal form of respiration the movements of the walls of the chest are limited. This occurs in pleurisy. In the thoracic form of respiration the abdominal wall is held rigid and the movement ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.



Words linked to "Diaphragm" :   contraceptive device, muscle system, body, musculature, trunk, iris, stop, muscular structure, photographic camera, prophylactic device, birth control device, tissue layer, general anatomy, preventative, disk, camera, contraceptive diaphragm, contraceptive, mechanical device, pessary, anatomy, midriff, iris diaphragm, electro-acoustic transducer, disc, preventive, torso, membrane



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