Glossary
Heat Treating Operator Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential heat treating operator terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key heat treating operator vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in heat treating operator training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Annealing
- Softening metal.
- Atmosphere
- Gas inside the furnace.
- Carburizing
- Adding carbon to the surface.
- Case hardening
- Hardening the surface.
- Distortion
- Warping.
- First article
- First part checked before a run.
- Hardening
- Heating and quenching to harden.
- Lockout/tagout
- Energy isolation before servicing.
- PPE
- Personal protective equipment.
- Quench
- Rapid cooling.
- Rockwell
- Hardness scale.
- Scrap
- Parts that fail inspection.
- Soak time
- Time at temperature.
- SOP
- Standard operating procedure.
- Tempering
- Reheating to reduce brittleness.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Heat Treating Operator practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Heat Treating Operator training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.