Glossary
Electrical Engineer Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential electrical engineer terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key electrical engineer vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in electrical engineer training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Arc flash
- An explosive release.
- Breaker
- Interrupts current.
- Coordination study
- Setting protective devices.
- Grounding
- Connecting to earth.
- Harmonics
- Distorted currents.
- Inverter
- Converts DC to AC.
- Load calculation
- Estimating power demand.
- NEC
- National Electrical Code.
- Ohm’s law
- Voltage equals current times resistance.
- One-line diagram
- A simplified power diagram.
- PCB
- Printed circuit board.
- Power factor
- Efficiency of power use.
- Schematic
- A circuit diagram.
- Short circuit
- An unintended low-resistance path.
- Transformer
- Changes voltage.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Electrical Engineer practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Electrical Engineer training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.