What’s the difference between a motor and an engine?

Because technologies and devices progress, language must stay on the toes if we expect to comprehend each other when we talk about all of them. English-speakers are particularly flexible in adapting to progress. They’re prepared to coin new terms, change old meanings, and allow terms that are no longer useful to move from common usage. “The etymologies of ‘motor’ as well as ‘engine’ reflect the way dialect evolves to represent what’s occurring in the world, ” says DURCH literature professor Mary Larger.

The Oxford English Thesaurus defines “motor” as a device that supplies motive energy for a vehicle or some other device with moving components. Similarly, it tells us that the engine is a machine along with moving parts that changes power into motion. “We use the words interchangeably right now, ” says Fuller. “But originally, they meant completely different things. ”

“Motor” is actually rooted in the Classical Latina movere, “to move. ” It first referred to propulsive force, and later, to the individual or device that relocated something or caused motion. “As the word came through France into English, it was utilized in the sense of ‘initiator, ’ ” says Richer. “A person could be the electric motor of a plot or a politics organization. ” By the end from the 19th century, the Second Commercial Revolution had dotted the actual landscape with steel generators and factories, steamships and also railways, and a new term was needed for the systems that powered them. Grounded in the concept of motion, “motor” was the logical choice, through 1899, it had entered the particular vernacular as the word with regard to Duryea and Olds’ newfangled horseless carriages.

“Engine” will be from the Latin ingenium: personality, mental powers, talent, intelligence, or cleverness. In its trip through French and in to English, the word came to imply ingenuity, contrivance, and technique or malice. “In typically the 15th century, it also known a physical device: a musical instrument of torture, an equipment for catching game, the net, trap, or decoy, ” says Fuller.

Within the early 19th century, often the meanings of motor along with engine had already started to converge, both with reference to a mechanism providing propulsive force. “The first documented use of ‘engine’ to suggest an electrical machine driven with a petroleum motor occurs in 1853, ” says Fuller.

These days, the words are virtually associated. “Language evolves to take on brand new tasks, ” she describes. “Without thinking about it, we adjust to new meanings and keep the old behind. ” All of us talk about our computer’s dial, unaware that in the 1840s, the word referred to the panel at the front of a carriage which stopped mud from becoming splashed on the coachman. Likewise, the term “search engine” harks back to the older which means of “engine” as a contrivance, suggests Fuller. First found in 1984 to mean “a piece of hardware or software program, ” the phrase might have been informed by Charles Babbage’s 1822 use of “engine” in order to mean a calculating equipment.

The related word “engineer” was first used in 1380 to explain the constructor of army engines like siege functions and catapults, and by the first 18th century, referred specifically for the maker of motors and machines. The OED lists a second definition of “engineer” as well. “It is identifiable with the older usage that means ‘artifice, ’” says More voluminous. “An engineer is an writer or designer of some thing, a person who contrives a storyline, a schemer. ” The definition one can only wish will soon pass from typical usage.

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