Glossary
Quality Control Inspector Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential quality control inspector terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key quality control inspector vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in quality control inspector training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- AQL
- Acceptable quality limit used in sampling.
- Calibration
- Checking and adjusting instruments against standards.
- CAPA
- Corrective and preventive action.
- CMM
- Coordinate measuring machine.
- First-article inspection (FAI)
- A full inspection of the first part from a new process.
- GD&T
- Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing.
- Go/no-go gauge
- A gauge that quickly shows whether a feature is in tolerance.
- ISO 9001
- An international quality management standard.
- NCR
- Nonconformance report.
- Nonconformance
- A failure to meet a requirement.
- Root cause
- The underlying reason a problem occurred.
- Sampling plan
- Rules for how many parts to inspect.
- SPC
- Statistical process control.
- Specification
- The requirements a product must meet.
- Tolerance
- The allowed variation from a dimension.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Quality Control Inspector practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Quality Control Inspector training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.