Glossary
Safety Technician Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential safety technician terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key safety technician vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in safety technician training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Competent person
- Someone able to identify hazards and authorized to correct them.
- Confined space
- A space with limited entry and exit not designed for occupancy.
- Hazard
- Anything that could cause injury or illness.
- Hierarchy of controls
- Elimination, substitution, engineering, administrative controls and PPE.
- JHA
- Job hazard analysis: breaking a task into steps to find hazards.
- Lockout/tagout
- Controlling hazardous energy during maintenance.
- Near-miss
- An event that could have caused injury but didn’t.
- Noise dosimeter
- A device that measures a worker’s noise exposure.
- OSHA 300 log
- The record of work-related injuries and illnesses.
- Permissible exposure limit (PEL)
- OSHA’s legal exposure limit for a substance.
- PPE
- Personal protective equipment.
- Recordable injury
- An injury that must be recorded on the OSHA log.
- SDS
- Safety data sheet for a chemical.
- Toolbox talk
- A short safety meeting on the job.
- TRIR
- Total recordable incident rate.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Safety Technician practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Safety Technician training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.