Glossary
Industrial Painter Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential industrial painter terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key industrial painter vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in industrial painter training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Cure
- Hardening with heat.
- DFT
- Dry film thickness.
- First article
- First part checked before a run.
- Lockout/tagout
- Energy isolation before servicing.
- Masking
- Covering areas.
- Mil
- One thousandth of an inch.
- Orange peel
- Bumpy finish.
- Overspray
- Paint that misses.
- Powder coating
- Electrostatic dry paint.
- PPE
- Personal protective equipment.
- Pretreatment
- Cleaning before coating.
- Runs
- Drips.
- Scrap
- Parts that fail inspection.
- SOP
- Standard operating procedure.
- Transfer efficiency
- Paint that lands.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Industrial Painter practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Industrial Painter training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.