n. | 1. | Natural capacity; ability; skill. | ||||||||||||
2. | Anything used to effect a purpose; any device or contrivance; a machine; an agent. | |||||||||||||
3. | Any instrument by which any effect is produced; especially, an instrument or machine of war or torture. | |||||||||||||
4. | (Mach.) A compound machine by which any physical power is applied to produce a given physical effect.
| |||||||||||||
v. t. | 1. | To assault with an engine. | ||||||||||||
2. | To equip with an engine; - said especially of steam vessels; | |||||||||||||
3. | Pronounced, in this sense, .) To rack; to torture. |
Noun | 1. | engine - motor that converts thermal energy to mechanical work |
2. | engine - something used to achieve a purpose; "an engine of change" | |
3. | ![]() |
(jargon) | engine - 1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some
function but can't be used without some kind of front end.
Today we have, especially, "print engine": the guts of a
laser printer. 2. An analogous piece of software; notionally, one that does a lot of noisy crunching, such as a "database engine", or "search engine". The hackish senses of "engine" are actually close to its original, pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever device, or instrument (the word is cognate to "ingenuity"). This sense had not been completely eclipsed by the modern connotation of power-transducing machinery in Charles Babbage's time, which explains why he named the stored-program computer that he designed in 1844 the "Analytical Engine". |