This page gathers the 9,098 dictionary entries belonging to the domain “Engineering”, as labelled by Wiktionary. Each word leads to its full entry: definitions, etymology, pronunciation, examples. Page 4 of 91: from “antikickback” to “astral plane”.
- antikickback adj Serving to prevent kickbacks (accidents with machinery).
- antilogue adj of or pertaining to the magnetic pole that becomes negative as its temperature increases and positive as its temperature decreases
- antimessage noun A message in a distributed system whose purpose is to cancel out another specific message sent previously.
- antimetric adj The converse of symmetric in electrical network theory, especially filter theory. A network where the input and output image impedances are…
- antimetry noun A property of an electrical network where the normalised impedance of one port is the reciprocal of another.
- antipacket noun A record indicating that a previously transmitted packet of data was successfully received, and preventing it from being sent again to the…
- antiplane adj Being or pertaining to a special class of deformation where the displacements in the body are zero in the plane of interest but non-zero in…
- antiportal noun A defined plane or volume that can never be seen through, and which thus reduces the number of calculations involved in rendering a…
- antishadow noun An inaccurate shadow in a three-dimensional rendering, caused by a vertex of an object being projected through the point of a light source.
- antiskid noun Antiskid braking.
- antitracking adj Of a system or application, preventing the gathering or collecting of personal data or information.
- antiviral adj Eliminating or inhibiting the action of a computer virus.
- antiworm adj Countering or preventing worms (self-replicating programs).
- anycast noun A network addressing and routing scheme whereby data is routed to the nearest or best destination as viewed by the routing topology.
- AP noun Initialism of access point.
- apartment noun A conceptual space used for separation in the threading architecture. Objects in one apartment cannot directly access those in another, but…
- aperture noun A hole which restricts the diameter of the lightpath through one plane in an optical system.
- aplanat noun A lens that has been corrected for spherical aberration and coma in order to produce a rectilinear image.
- app noun An application (program), especially a small one designed for a mobile device.
- app wrapper noun An application for mobile devices made wholly from an existing website or platform, with few or no changes made to the original version.
- appbar noun A toolbar, anchored to an edge of the user's desktop, providing quick access to programs or features.
- append noun An instance of writing more data to the end of an existing file.
- appendable adj That can be extended by appending to it.
- appification noun The conversion of traditional programs, websites, etc. into small, self-contained apps targeting mobile devices.
- applet noun A small program module that runs under the control of a larger application, typically a web browser.
- appliance computer noun A computer sold to consumers as a unit ready to be switched on and used, rather than a kit for self-assembly.
- application noun A computer program or the set of software that the end user perceives as a single entity as a tool for a well-defined purpose. (Also…
- application bundle noun A package format, often a directory with a specific structure, containing all the files and resources necessary for a program to run.
- application domain noun An isolated context, with its own virtual address space, in which an application runs, analogous to a process in an operating system.
- application program noun A computer program written to solve a particular problem or to be used in a particular user-defined application.
- application programming interface noun A set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications, which makes it possible for software components to interact…
- application software noun A set of computer programs that work together to solve a particular problem or to be used for a particular user-defined application.
- applicative adj Of a programming language: using successive functional transformations on data to arrive at a result.
- approach noun The way an aircraft comes in to land at an airport.
- approximation algorithm noun A method of finding a nearly optimal solution to an optimization problem that cannot be solved exactly within a reasonable time.
- AprilTag noun A type of tag consisting of a grid of black and white squares, used in robotics and computer vision applications.
- apron noun The paved area of an airport, especially the area where aircraft park away from a terminal.
- ar noun An AR-15 personal semi-automatic rifle, M-16 assault rifle, M-4 carbine, derivative or related gun; the Armalite AR family and derivatives.
- arbiter noun A component in circuitry that allocates scarce resources.
- arbitrary unit noun A relative unit of measurement to show the ratio of amount of substance, intensity, or other quantities, to a predetermined reference…
- arbitrary-precision arithmetic noun Any calculation that is performed on numbers whose digits of precision are limited only by the available memory of the host system.
- arc fault noun An undesired and uncontrolled electric arc from one conductor through the air (or other gas) to a conductor at ground potential or a…
- arc-fault circuit interrupter noun A type of circuit breaker that detects signs of potentially-dangerous arcing on downstream wiring and shuts off power to the affected…
- arch noun An architecture; a computer architecture or instruction set architecture.
- Archie noun An Acorn Archimedes computer.
- Archimedes' screw noun A screwlike device invented by Greek mathematician Archimedes, ca. 200 B.C.E., which when twisted inside a cylinder, raises water from a…
- architecture noun A family of CPUs sharing a common instruction set and having partial or full compatibility with software built on each other.
- archive verb To transfer (less used or obsolete data, files, etc.) to a storage medium for long-term storage.
- arcover noun The unwanted arcing of electricity from one component to another, caused for example by the presence of contaminants.
- area rule noun A rule stating that an airplane designed with the same cross-sectional area distribution in the longitudinal direction as the Sears-Haack…
- arf phrase "Abort, Retry, Fail?"
- arg noun An argument; a value passed as a parameter.
- argument noun A value, or a reference to a value, passed to a function.
- aristocrat noun A cipher in which the original punctuation and spacing are retained.
- arithmetic operation noun Any one of the four basic operations in arithmetic: addition, subtraction, multiplication or division; any one of said operations as…
- arity noun The number of arguments or operands a function or operation takes. For a relation, the number of domains in the corresponding Cartesian…
- arm verb To become prepared for action; to activate.
- armature noun A kinematic chain (a system of bones or rigid bodies connected by joints) that is used to pose and deform models, often character models.
- Armstrong's axioms noun A set of references (or, more precisely, inference rules) used to infer all the functional dependencies on a relational database.
- array noun Any of various data structures designed to hold multiple elements of the same type; especially, a data structure that holds these elements…
- arraylet noun Any of the subarrays that make up a larger array-like data structure whose elements do not have to be stored contiguously.
- arresting gear noun A system used to quickly decelerate a landing aircraft, essential for landing on an aircraft carrier (although land-based airfields can…
- arrow noun A morphism.
- arrow key noun Any of a set of keyboard keys marked with directional arrows, used for navigation through documents and lists etc.
- arsenal plane noun A cargoplane filled with munitions, that are deployed when airborne by dropping them out the rear door, and having the weapons perform any…
- artifact noun A perceptible distortion that appears in an audio or video file or an image as a result of applying a lossy compression or other inexact…
- artificial bee colony noun A metaheuristic-based optimization algorithm inspired by the intelligent foraging behavior of honey bee swarms.
- artificial horizon noun An instrument that displays the pitch and roll of an aircraft in flight by comparing its attitude to a gyroscopically-maintained indication…
- artificial intelligence noun The branch of computer science dealing with the reproduction or mimicking of human-level intelligence, self-awareness, knowledge…
- artificial language noun A formal language.
- as-if rule noun A rule by which compilers are allowed to apply any optimizing transformation to a program provided that it makes no change to the…
- ASA character noun A standard carriage control character added to the start of each line of text to be printed on a line printer
- ASC noun ASC (“an ASCII-encoded text file”): Ellipsis of ASC file
- ascending adj That causes a sequence to follow an ascending order.
- ASCII art noun A form of computer letter art that uses only ASCII characters.
- ASCIIfy verb To convert into ASCII or, more generally, into 7-bit data.
- ash noun The resultant remaining more stable patterns that emerge from the evolution of a soup or a similarly random pattern.
- aspect noun In aspect-oriented programming, a feature or component that can be applied to parts of a program independent of any inheritance hierarchy.
- aspect-oriented adj Describing a system which has been written so that different subsystems appear to add themselves to the main business logic without that…
- aspect-oriented language noun A programming language that aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns.
- aspect-oriented programming noun A programming paradigm that aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns.
- aspectualize verb To use as an implementation for aspects.
- assemble verb To translate from assembly language to machine code.
- assembler noun A program that reads source code written in assembly language and produces executable machine code, possibly together with information…
- assembly noun Ellipsis of assembly language.
- assembly language noun A programming language in which the source code of programs is composed of mnemonic instructions, each of which corresponds directly to a…
- assembly time noun The amount of time required for a computer to translate symbolic computer language into instructions of a machine language.
- assert noun Synonym of assertion.
- assertion noun A statement in a program asserting a condition expected to be true at a particular point, used in debugging.
- asset noun Any component, model, process or framework of value that can be leveraged or reused.
- assign verb To give (a value) to a variable.
- assignment noun An operation that assigns a value to a variable.
- association list noun A data structure that associates keys with data; implemented as a list whose members are paired storage locations (cons cells), one element…
- associative adj Addressable by a key more complex than an integer index.
- associativity noun The property of an operator which determines how it is grouped with operators of the same precedence in the absence of parentheses.
- astable adj Having multiple states, none of which is stable.
- astigmatism noun A defect of a lens such that light rays coming from a point do not meet at a focal point so that the image is blurred.
- astonisher noun An exclamation mark, the punctuation mark “!”.
- astragal noun A circular molding near the mouth of a cannon.
- astral plane noun A Unicode plane (range of code points) above the Basic Multilingual Plane; any plane beyond U+FFFF.