About

Industrial Dictionary defines 5,000 terms drawn from 26 trades: the supplies, equipment and components you order, the processes you run, and the lingo that only makes sense on the floor.

What is in it

Every entry carries a headword, a part of speech, the trade the sense belongs to, any register label that matters (slang, dated, regional, obsolete), a definition written for the industrial sense of the word, and a link to its source.

Coverage is broadest in manufacturing, electrical engineering, automotive, mining, rail and construction. It deliberately includes a shop talk and trade slang section, because the names people actually use rarely make it into a catalogue.

Where it comes from

Definitions are selected from English Wiktionary through the Kaikki.org Wiktextract exports, built from the 2026-07-06 English Wiktionary dump (snapshot published 2026-07-25). Only senses explicitly carrying an industrial topic label are considered. Empty, malformed and meta only glosses are rejected, and headwords are deduplicated case insensitively across the whole collection.

Definitions are lightly normalised for delivery: whitespace collapsed, control characters removed. No quotations, etymologies, translations or pronunciation media are copied. Every entry links to the live Wiktionary page for its full history.

How we decide what belongs

A term earns an entry when it does real work in a trade. That includes catalogue vocabulary, process names and units, and it includes slang, which we label rather than exclude. What we leave out is the everyday sense of a word when it has nothing to do with industry.

Safety

This is a terminology reference, not an operating manual. A definition that says what a tool or process does is not a safe work procedure. Before operating, servicing, lifting, energising, cutting, entering or isolating equipment, use the manufacturer's current instructions, your site's approved procedure, and the laws and standards that apply where you are. Shop slang varies by plant and region.

Corrections

If an entry is wrong, or a term you use every day is missing, tell us. Corrections from people who use the vocabulary at work are the most useful messages we get.

Reuse

Entry text is available under CC BY-SA 4.0. See the licence page for the conditions.