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Industrial Dictionary records the working vocabulary of industry: 8,000 entries across 35 trades. The supplies, equipment and components you order, the processes you run, and the words people actually use when they talk about them.

A short history

The dictionary has been curated and maintained by volunteers since 2005. It began as a mechanics terminology website, put together by people who were tired of explaining the same shop words to every new starter, and who could not find any of it written down in one place.

It widened from there. Metalworking and machining pulled in metallurgy and metrology. Automotive pulled in rail and heavy plant. Electrical work pulled in electronics, energy and utilities. Over the years the collection grew to cover the vocabulary of trades well beyond the garage, until what held it together was no longer one industry but a simple fact: all of these trades name things for a living, and almost none of that naming is recorded anywhere a newcomer can find it.

How a term gets in

Every candidate term is checked and cross examined against multiple sources online. A term is published only once the professional staff agree there is enough evidence that it is in wide use in the industry. A word one shop uses is interesting; a word used across a trade is a dictionary entry, and the difference between those two is the work.

That standard is also why the dictionary carries register labels rather than quietly excluding informal vocabulary. Slang that is genuinely widespread earns an entry and a label, because pretending it is not used helps nobody who has to understand it.

The forums

Between 2010 and 2016 this site ran discussion forums, and they are where a great deal of the early collection came from. The forums are no longer available, but the debt is worth stating plainly: thank you to the large community of enthusiasts who argued over regional variants, sent in terms from their own trades, and helped compile the first critical mass of entries in the early days. Much of what is here started as a thread.

What is in an entry

Every entry carries a headword, a part of speech, the trade the sense belongs to, any register label that matters, a definition written for the industrial sense of the word, and a link to its source. Longer entries add an article explaining what the thing actually does, how it varies, and what goes wrong with it.

Register labels are the ones worth understanding. When an entry is marked slang, informal, dated or regional, that is a note about audience rather than about correctness. A term can be perfectly clear to the people you work beside and completely wrong in a purchase order.

Sources and credit

Entries come from more than one place, and each is credited where it appears. A large part of the current collection is drawn from English Wiktionary through the Kaikki.org Wiktextract exports, and every one of those entries links to its source page so you can see where a definition came from and who wrote it. Only senses explicitly carrying an industrial topic label were considered, and headwords are deduplicated across the whole collection.

The rest is the dictionary's own: terms compiled, checked and written here over the years, credited to Industrial Dictionary. Further material is being prepared for import, and as it lands this section will say what came from where.

Definitions are lightly normalised for delivery: whitespace collapsed, control characters removed, dashes regularised. No quotations, etymologies, translations or pronunciation media are copied from third party sources.

Corrections

The most useful messages we get still come from people who use a word at work and find it defined badly here. Vocabulary varies by plant, by region and by decade, and no single source captures that. If an entry is wrong, or a term you use every day is missing, tell us and say where you work with it. Corrections get acted on before they get answered, which is usually what people actually want.

Fun terms

Alongside the main dictionary there is a Fun terms section: 500 pieces of shop floor and site slang collected from Urban Dictionary, where a lot of trade language gets written down first. Those entries are credited and linked back to their authors, and they are kept separate from the main dictionary on purpose. They have not been through the same verification as a dictionary entry. They are how people talk, not what you put in a specification.

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, and an article explaining how a machine works is not training on how to use one. 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.

Reuse

Entry text is available under CC BY-SA 4.0. See the licence page for how to credit it.