Technical Do you say Engine or Motor?

Truck64 · Dec 23, 2018

choffman41 said: ↑

I say toe-may-toe but my wife says toe-mot-toe. What can I do?
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Tomato ain't a vegetable, but don't use it in fruit salad.

The37Kid · Dec 24, 2018

Were can I buy some Cowboy Shoes?

Bob

loudbang · Dec 24, 2018

It's really simple science.

An engine, either internal combustion, steam or Laser converts potential energy, Fuel (not yet energetic)to motion.

A motor converts real energy, electron flow (electricity) (already energetic) to motion.

choffman41 · Dec 24, 2018

You all, of course, are totally missing the essence of this question. The REAL issue is, which terminology is TRADITIONAL?

rockable · Dec 24, 2018

Hasn't this been fun? Anyone want to start on Pee Cans or Pi Cons? LOL. Let's don't.

HOTRODPRIMER · Dec 24, 2018

rockable said: ↑

Hasn't this been fun? Anyone want to start on Pee Cans or Pi Cons? LOL. Let's don't.
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You know as well as anyone, the Southern dialect is the correct enunciation. HRP

Jalopy Joker · Dec 24, 2018

boat anchor

HOTRODPRIMER · Dec 24, 2018

Jalopy Joker said: ↑

boat anchor
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I've had a couple of them. HRP

choffman41 · Dec 24, 2018

rockable said: ↑

Hasn't this been fun? Anyone want to start on Pee Cans or Pi Cons? LOL. Let's don't.
Click to expand...

I have some amond trees. City folks call them almonds.

farmer12 · Dec 24, 2018

Engine=combustion, motor=electric

Sky Six · Dec 24, 2018

HOTRODPRIMER said: ↑

You know as well as anyone, the Southern dialect is the correct enunciation. HRP
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Which Southern dialect?
Southern Arizona we say: "Pacana"
Oh crap, we're arguing already. !!!

porknbeaner · Dec 24, 2018

quicksilverart46 said: ↑

Thank you for this post and I agree..I was taught the same and the fact is it is absolutely true and correct and it had always bugged me too . When we were kids messing with lawnmowers , minibikes and go karts they were “Internal combustion ENGINES!” And we all called them as such .When I was involved in slot car racing at 14 -15 years old the power was from an “ELECTRIC MOTOR!” That was the early to mid ‘60’s. I never here a electric motor called an engine. Then sometime in the ‘70’s I first heard of
a car engine being called a motor. I’m not sure how it got started but maybe two possibilities were the Chiltons motor manual publications and Motor Trend magazine both using the term motor for automotive engines and anything automotive related made it acceptable whether it was right or wrong. The term still bugs me but at this point it is hopeless to ever straighten out since nobody really cares about right or wrong anymore.

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LOL lets muddy the water up a little more. A siege tower as well as a catapult is also known as a War Engine. The catapult at least has moving parts and this was long before electricity was harnessed so I got to postulate that is why they were never called a war motor.

porknbeaner · Dec 24, 2018

engine
noun
en·gine | \ˈen-jən \
Definition of engine
(Entry 1 of 2)

1 obsolete

a : ingenuity

b : evil contrivance : wile

2a : something used to effect a purpose : agent, instrument mournful and terrible engine of horror and of crime— E. A. Poe

b : something that produces a particular and usually desirable result engines of economic growth

3a : a mechanical tool: such as

(1) : an instrument or machine of war

(2) obsolete : a torture implement

b : machinery

c : any of various mechanical appliances —often used in combination fire engine

4 : a machine for converting any of various forms of energy into mechanical force and motion also : a mechanism or object that serves as an energy source black holes may be the engines for quasars

5 : a railroad locomotive

6 : computer software that performs a fundamental function especially of a larger program

porknbeaner · Dec 24, 2018

motor
noun
mo·tor | \ˈmō-tər \
Definition of motor
(Entry 1 of 3)

1 : one that imparts motion specifically : prime mover

2 : any of various power units that develop energy or impart motion: such as

a : a small compact engine

b : internal combustion engine especially : a gasoline engine

c : a rotating machine that transforms electrical energy into mechanical energy

3 : motor vehicle especially : automobile

porknbeaner · Dec 24, 2018

The problem with these threads is that many who participate may speak English some even as their first language but few know English.

Now that I have caused someone severe consternation let me leave you with this, Happy Holidays, or Merry Christmas or Merry X-mas. Well all except my Texican Friends (who are many) to those I say Feilx Navidad.

choffman41 · Dec 24, 2018

Felix was Navi's dad? Used my favorite search motor, Google, but couldn't find any info.

sport fury · Jan 20, 2019

I was taught that engines have an internal power source and motors have an external power source. could both terms fall under the description of motor? all frogs and toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads.

oldiron 440 · Jan 20, 2019

I use both in the same sentence to both appease and piss off everyone.

oliver westlund · Jan 20, 2019

Truck64 said: ↑

It is annoying. That's why, of course, they are called Ford Engine Company, and American Engines Corporation, General Engines, Harley Davidson Engine Company, Bavarian Engine Works, and of course the Indianapolis Engine Speedway.

Oh, and the Department of Engine Vehicles, where I get my enginecycle registered.

Happy Engineing!
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hahahahahahahahahahahahaha im crying, best laugh ive had in a while, scared my son half to death

choffman41 · Jan 20, 2019

For the electric muscle car crowd......

deathrowdave · Jan 20, 2019

I call the damn thing a MILL !

v8flat44 · Jan 20, 2019

Well there's steam engine, internal combustion engine, radial engine....... Then there's an electric motor; my favorite is a.....FLATMOTOR !!! Done!

Deuces · Jan 20, 2019

Wow, and I thought this thread got nuked.....

stude54ht · Jan 20, 2019

Really?

gimpyshotrods · Jan 20, 2019

Language is one of those unfortunate places where if you repeat the incorrect enough, it becomes correct.

George Orwell had it right all along, he just missed the date a little.

Now we are stuck with NuSpeak, and it is double-plus un-good.

Ignorance has become strength.

Perry Hvegholm · Jan 20, 2019

I'm not particular about this. Being a mechanical engineer by trade, I still don't have a particular preference here and the use of either does not bother me. Neither do the terms "powerplant" or "mill".

quicksilverart46 · Jan 21, 2019

ClarkH said: ↑

Blame the Brits! Per Wikipedia: " 'Motor car' is attested from 1895, and is the usual formal name for cars in British English."
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Well that figures!

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quicksilverart46 · Jan 21, 2019

Tyresmoke said: ↑

Engine and Motor
On the rare occasions we encounter one, we refer to a steam locomotive as an engine, the same word that we give to the motive power of an aircraft. But all electrical devices are driven by motors. In Britain at least, one’s personal transport is a motor car (with compounds such as motor trade, motor vehicle and motor sport), even though it’s always powered by an engine. Small boats may have outboard motors and then are often called motor boats.

However, the propulsion device of a rocket can be called either a rocket motor or a rocket engine, and usage here seems not to have settled on one or the other. The IEEE Spectrum magazine for June 1998 (which Ron Jeffries has thoughtfully sent me) reports that the debate has been so intense, and yet so inconclusive, that some rocket scientist has coined the phrase whoosh generator as “the humorous, genderless, politically correct way to refer to the propulsion device in a hobby rocket, thus avoiding the great motor/engine debate”.

In everyday, non-technical usage the words have much the same meaning. But they have such clearly defined and fixed compounds (except in the rocket case) that they can’t be thought of as entirely interchangeable. The magazine article argues that the difference is that engines contain their own fuel or are part of a highly integrated engine-fuel system, whereas a motor draws on externally supplied energy. That’s the rule given in the Oxford English Dictionary, but on reflection it seems not wholly satisfactory. It doesn’t work for outboard motor or rocket motor for example. And it doesn’t explain why the two words should have been applied in this way. For that we have to look into their history.

Engine is from the Latin ingenium, which referred to one’s ability to create things, one’s native genius; it comes from a root meaning ‘create; beget’ from which we get words like genetic, and is also the source of ingenious and ingenuity (engineer derives from a related word). Its first meaning in English, from about the fourteenth century, was very much this one of mother wit or genius, a skill in devising things. It could also, by obvious extension, refer to the result of such ingenuity, a contrivance or device, particularly any mechanical apparatus. The term was very general; a sixteenth-century text directs that a person should be “put in the stocks or other such engine”; pulleys and their like were also engines (as in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels of 1727: “With ropes and engines, I made a shift to turn it”). The British pub served its drink by means of beer engines, hand pumps which drew the brew up from casks in the cellar; blazes were extinguished with the help of fire engines, originally hand-operated pumps. In the 1670s one John Worlidge invented a machine for pulping apples in cidermaking; he termed his device the Ingenio, an obvious reference to the Latin original. Engine was commonly applied also to weapons of war, such as the siege engine and to devices such as snares for catching game (hence gin trap, where gin is a short form of engine that also turned up in compounds such as horse gin for a horse-powered windlass).

It was an obvious enough extension to apply the word to the new devices that created power through steam. At first these were static units designed to pump water from mines, hugely complicated even in their early Newcomen incarnations. The steam engine was such an important machine, being one of the crucial developments of the Industrial Revolution, in particular making possible deep mines, that engine soon came to apply almost exclusively to it (being replaced in most other cases by machine, a word that earlier had meant almost the same as engine). And that usage came to influence later extensions of it, as in petrol and diesel engines: no longer just a contrivance, but a system for producing propulsive power.

Incidentally, computer science has several terms that include engine, such as search engine, database engine and recognition engine. In all of them engine has the sense of a central part or kernel of a software application, hidden from the user, which does intensive ‘number-crunching’ work on data, only the results of which are made available. Charles Babbage named his Victorian mechanical computer the Analytical Engine, using the pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of the word. I would guess, in view of the almost iconic regard many computer scientists have for Babbage’s work, that the modern terms derive directly from this phrase.

Motor had quite different origins, coming from the Latin movere, ‘to move’. It was first employed in English in the sense of ‘instigator’, or something that causes motion, often in a figurative sense, as of God as being the cause of the motion of the heavens. Even by the nineteenth century, it was still applied generally to the idea of something that caused change, without necessarily implying a mechanical device; for example the Civil Engineering Journal in 1839 said “The true motor of the system would ... be the weight of the atmosphere”, in which motor here is an agent or force (a sense which is still current). It was also applied early in the same century to classes of muscles or nerves whose job was to cause parts of the body to move. Only in the 1850s did it begin to be applied to a device that employed some source of energy to create movement, being applied first to the electric motor and to hydraulic devices.

When the electric motor appeared, people saw a key difference between it and the steam engine. The latter had an obvious source of energy in its fuel; the source of energy of the former was less clear, being supplied mysteriously from a battery or generator by means of wires. Steam engines obviously consumed their fuel, but electrical and hydraulic devices extracted energy from some source without obviously consuming it. Perhaps this reminded people of the original sense of motor that referred to some intangible or spiritual force, and persuaded them to apply it to these new sources of power.

By the time that vehicles driven by internal combustion engines had begun to appear in any numbers, at the very end of the century, both words had become well established in common usage. The driving force was obviously an engine, which consumed fuel to provide motive power. But why the conveyance as a whole was termed a motor vehicle is less obvious. The mere fact of it moving was obviously not sufficient; that was hardly a new idea, after all. It may be that it was a more elegant word, and also helpfully distinguished the automobile as a system from anything that belched steam and soot, such as the early steam-driven road vehicles like the Stanley Steamer.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the two words had moved together from very different origins, even though as we’ve seen, for historical reasons they were mostly employed in set compounds. But when new forms of propulsive device came along, analogy (or sometimes chance) decided which was to be applied in a particular case. Aeroplanes were obviously powered by engines, since the earliest ones were taken over directly from petrol engines of the kind that drove cars and lorries. Though there seems to be no clear evidence for the choice, perhaps outboard motor was so termed because it was a compact device that reminded its namers of electric motors.

The confusion between rocket engine and rocket motor is less obvious. By analogy with other devices that consume fuel, it ought to be an engine, but perhaps by the time it came to be named motor had become so close a synonym that either felt right.

Ref: http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/engine.htm

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Wow!! Very informative. Still inconclusive as to how the terms got interchanged but after reading a previous post I would say it was the Brits that mixed the terms and then became a common term here in the states with calling outboards motors but I’m sticking with internal combustion or steam is a engine and electric motors are motors . We never hear a starter motor or slot car motor ever called a engine

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quicksilverart46 · Jan 21, 2019

Oldioron said: ↑

I've called a gas engine a motor but never called an electric motor an engine if that makes sence.
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It’s just a crazy mixed up world !

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quicksilverart46 · Jan 21, 2019

loudbang said: ↑

It's really simple science.

An engine, either internal combustion, steam or Laser converts potential energy, Fuel (not yet energetic)to motion.

A motor converts real energy, electron flow (electricity) (already energetic) to motion.
Click to expand...

[emoji108][emoji109][emoji91]

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