Hygrometer
Hygrometer
[Megan and Cueball are walking and talking. Cueball is holding his phone with one hand, looking at it.] Megan: ...A hygrometer is a device for measuring— Cueball: I want one! Ooh, found one for $7.99 with free shipping! I'm buying it. Megan: —Humidity. Cueball: Oh, cool!
[Caption below the frame:] For some reason, I feel a powerful compulsion to own any device whose name ends in "-ometer."

Here, Megan is talking to Cueball about hygrometers . But before she can even finish explaining what it does, Cueball has looked up, found, and purchased the product. A hygrometer is an instrument for measuring the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, or the amount of water in solids such as soil or wood.
It seems Randall (or Cueball) loves being able to measure things and therefore finds instruments or measurement tools that end in -ometer very interesting, and wishes to own all of them. Many measuring instruments use the suffix -meter which is derived from the Greek noun μέτρον for "measure". The character "o" always belongs to the first term, but it also belongs to old Greek words like Thermo -meter, micro -meter, or even hygro -meter. Other measurement devices such as speedometer use an English word with an "o" appended to mimic the Greek-derived terms, purportedly for easier marketing. Because themes in science often based on Greek terminology that ending at the first part appears often. Nonetheless, Randall believes that this "o" belongs to the general term for measuring devices.
In the title text, Randall states he is working on assembling a combination of usually unrelated measuring instruments, for a purpose that is neither stated in the comic nor easy to guess. The list consists of:
Finally, he mentions an ometerometer , a concatenation of -ometer with itself, which would be a device for measuring devices. It has been included in a humorous list of Other Types of Ometers from 2007, where it was described as measuring the measuring capacities of other measuring devices.
[Megan and Cueball are walking and talking. Cueball is holding his phone with one hand, looking at it.] Megan: ...A hygrometer is a device for measuring— Cueball: I want one! Ooh, found one for $7.99 with free shipping! I'm buying it. Megan: —Humidity. Cueball: Oh, cool!
[Caption below the frame:] For some reason, I feel a powerful compulsion to own any device whose name ends in "-ometer."
