Glossary
Mechanical Engineer Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential mechanical engineer terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key mechanical engineer vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in mechanical engineer training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- BOM
- Bill of materials.
- CFD
- Computational fluid dynamics.
- Design review
- A team evaluation of designs.
- DFM
- Design for manufacturing.
- ECO
- Engineering change order.
- Factor of safety
- Design margin.
- Fatigue
- Failure from repeated loading.
- FEA
- Finite element analysis.
- GD&T
- Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing.
- Heat transfer
- Movement of heat.
- Prototype
- Early model.
- Strain
- Deformation.
- Stress
- Force per area.
- Thermodynamics
- Energy and heat.
- Tolerance
- Allowed variation.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Mechanical Engineer practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Mechanical Engineer training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.