An optical instrument that uses autocollimation to measure very small angles, tilts, or misalignments with remarkable precision.
From autocollimation + -or (agent suffix). Coined in the late 1800s as optical engineering advanced and needed increasingly precise tools for alignment and quality control.
Modern factories use autocollimators to verify that components are aligned to within millionths of a degree—they're essentially the eyes of precision manufacturing, checking if a surface is truly flat or if something has shifted by an impossibly tiny amount.
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