Glossary
Mechanical Engineering Technician Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential mechanical engineering technician terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key mechanical engineering technician vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in mechanical engineering technician training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- 3D printing
- Additive manufacturing.
- BOM
- Bill of materials.
- CAD
- Computer-aided design.
- Data acquisition
- Collecting sensor data.
- DFM
- Design for manufacturing.
- Durability test
- Testing over time.
- ECO
- Engineering change order.
- Failure analysis
- Finding why parts fail.
- Fixture
- Holds parts for testing.
- GD&T
- Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing.
- Load cell
- Measures force.
- Prototype
- An early model.
- Root cause
- The underlying reason for a failure.
- Strain gauge
- Measures deformation.
- Tolerance
- Allowed variation.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Mechanical Engineering Technician practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Mechanical Engineering Technician training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.