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A cardiogram is a record of muscle activity, and a cardiograph is the machine that produces it -- I know and understand this difference. That said, every time I'm having to use one of these words (or recollect them), I confuse the two. Is there a good way to remember which is which?

WorldGov
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    It's consistent with other usage -- e.g., a telegram is (was?) the message, a telegraph was the device which transmitted it. – Mike Harris Oct 06 '18 at 14:53
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    I'd appreciate if one can explain the downvotes. Just trying to improve my skills here -- didn't the answer to this question reveal an interesting aspect of the English language? – WorldGov Oct 07 '18 at 09:31
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    @WorldGov - I agree, it is hard to understand why people might downvote and even 'vote to close' without giving any reason. – Dan Oct 07 '18 at 11:39

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This really is tricky because there is no hard and fast rule.

Autographs do not make autograms; monographs do not make mongrams, and photographs do not make photograms. In fact:

A cardio-gram is a record of muscle activity. A cardio-graph makes cardiograms.

An auto-gram is a sentence that describes itself in the sense of providing an inventory of its own characters. An auto-graph is a signature.

A photo-gram is a picture produced with photographic materials, such as light-sensitive paper, but without a camera. A photo-graph is an image created by light falling on a photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor, such as a CCD.

A mono-gram is a motif made by overlapping or combining two or more letters or other graphemes to form one symbol. A mono-graph is a specialist work of writing on a single subject or an aspect of a subject, often by a single author, and usually on a scholarly subject.

If it is only the 'cardio-' pairing that is important then I might remember by saying that the one with the m (i.e. cardiogram) is the one that is NOT the m-achine. But that's just the way my mind works!

Community
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Dan
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    How interesting! I'll add two more for fun: An epigram is a terse, sage, or witty and often paradoxical saying, while an epigraph is a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions to suggest its theme. A phonogram is a character or symbol used to represent a word, syllable, or phoneme, while a phonograph is a an instrument for reproducing sounds by means of the vibration of a stylus or needle following a spiral groove on a revolving disc or cylinder. (Quoting merriram-webster.com.) – BobRodes Oct 06 '18 at 16:08
  • That poses an interesting question for semanticists: how did graph and gram grow to have these multiple meanings. – WorldGov Oct 07 '18 at 09:35