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Motor or Engine?

Discussion in 'Wrenchin' Secrets' started by garybuick, Sep 1, 2007.

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garybuick Time Traveler

I thought a motor was an electric powered and an engine is fuel combustion? Ive always thought motor was the wrong word for automobile engine? Is there any truth to this?

garybuick, Sep 1, 2007

#1
bobc455 Well-Known Member

Both are correct.

Electric motors are generally not called engines. But a gasoline engine can also be called a motor.

-Bob C.

bobc455, Sep 1, 2007

#2
tlivingd BIG BLOCK, THE ANTI PRIUS

I'm with you Gary, if it runs off of combustion it's an engine. it's electric it's a motor.

but this is one of those things like:
drinking fountain, water fountain, water cooler, bubbler <Wisconsin thing)
soda or pop

-nate

tlivingd, Sep 1, 2007

#3
nailheadina67 Official Nailheader

There was another thread last month about this same subject........my conclusion is that Buick makes engines, the others are just motors. LOL :idea2:

nailheadina67, Sep 1, 2007

#4
tlivingd BIG BLOCK, THE ANTI PRIUS

nailheadina67 said: ↑

There was another thread last month about this same subject........my conclusion is that Buick makes engines, the others are just motors. LOL :idea2:
Click to expand...

you haven't seen 400 ton crane motors have you? :laugh: this one is smaller but simmilar

this one is a bit bigger than the ones used on a 400 ton. Not sure where this one is used.

also the larger motors are usually DC operated.

tlivingd, Sep 1, 2007

#5
GRIMM Well-Known Member

nailheadina67 said: ↑

There was another thread last month about this same subject........my conclusion is that Buick makes engines, the others are just motors. LOL :idea2:
Click to expand...

I agree.

If it runs on combustion its an engine (Remember that thing, Internal Combustion Engine )

Electric Motors are just that, motors.

It seems like people have just come to call anything that provides power, and thus some sort of motion, motors.

GRIMM, Sep 2, 2007

#6
bob k. mando Guest

Department of Motor Vehicles.

Motor Manual.

Motor Sports.

you grammar nazi's had better get started stamping this out, you're losing the war AND all of the incidental battles.

bob k. mando, Sep 2, 2007

#7
BUICKRAT Got any treats?

Combustion engines, electric motors. Till the marketing guys got involved...I must admit-motor sports sounds better than engine sports. "Motor" manuals is a brand name. As for th DMV, well, what do you expect from the state? At least that's what I was taught...I guess I'll go check a dictionary or encyclopedia

BUICKRAT, Sep 2, 2007

#8
GRIMM Well-Known Member

bob k. mando said: ↑

Department of Motor Vehicles.

Motor Manual.

Motor Sports.

you grammar nazi's had better get started stamping this out, you're losing the war AND all of the incidental battles.
Click to expand...

LIES, ALL LIES

GRIMM, Sep 2, 2007

#9
NJBuickRacer I'd rather be racing...

How well does your engine run without motor oil?

NJBuickRacer, Sep 2, 2007

#10
flynbuick Guest

NJBuickRacer said: ↑

How well does your engine run without motor oil?
Click to expand...

I hated it when that happened to my motorboat. Once it happened to my motorcyle just when I was catching up to a motorcade which in turn almost caused me to be struck by a motor home.

Last edited by a moderator: Sep 2, 2007

flynbuick, Sep 2, 2007

#11
Stage1 Jeff Guest

and the world motors on

Stage1 Jeff, Sep 2, 2007

#12
bob k. mando Guest

"Motor" manuals is a brand name.

and where, pray tell, did "Motor Manual" get the concept to title the books? because they damn sure don't have anything to do with rebuilding electrical windings.
http://www.motor.com/Repair_Manuals/Repair_Products.htm

got another one for ya. y'all know Hemmings mag? ya know what the full name for the primary magazine is don't ya? that's right, "Hemmings Motor News".
http://www.hemmings.com/subscribe/current_issue.html?publication=HMN

bob k. mando, Sep 2, 2007

#13
nekkidhillbilly jeffreyrigged youtube channel owner

why do ppl care

nekkidhillbilly, Sep 3, 2007

#14
bob k. mando Guest

why do ppl care

i dunno, but they keep bringing it up.

i suspect it has to do with creating artificial distinctions so they can feel superior to all of the "ignorant masses". kind of like Goths, but without the trenchcoats or Emo's, but without the skirts.

bob k. mando, Sep 3, 2007

#15
APVGS Ottawa Go Fast Guy!!

garybuick said: ↑

I thought a motor was an electric powered and an engine is fuel combustion? Ive always thought motor was the wrong word for automobile engine? Is there any truth to this?
Click to expand...

Now look what you started!!! ou: Later,Tony.

APVGS, Sep 3, 2007

#16
Bad Boattail Guest

Engine is correct :TU:
(the name of the language is English, remember?)

But in the lazy dialect that you lot are "chewing-gumming", you are allowed to say motor.....:laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

In the UK, people use the word motor for the whole car:
"I like your motor, mate !!!"

ENGINE AND MOTOR
Two closely-related words investigated

On the rare occasions we encounter one, we refer to a steam locomotive as an engine, the same word that we give to the motive power of an aircraft. But all electrical devices are driven by motors. In Britain at least, ones personal transport is a motor car (with compounds such as motor trade, motor vehicle and motor sport), even though its always powered by an engine. Small boats may have outboard motors and then are often called motor boats.

However, the propulsion device of a rocket can be called either a rocket motor or a rocket engine, and usage here seems not to have settled on one or the other. The IEEE Spectrum magazine for June 1998 reports that the debate has been so intense, and yet so inconclusive, that some rocket scientist has coined the phrase whoosh generator as the humorous, genderless, politically correct way to refer to the propulsion device in a hobby rocket, thus avoiding the great motor/engine debate.

In everyday, non-technical usage the words have much the same meaning. But they have such clearly defined and fixed compounds (except in the rocket case) that they cant be thought of as entirely interchangeable. The magazine article argues that the difference is that engines contain their own fuel or are part of a highly integrated engine-fuel system, whereas a motor draws on externally supplied energy. Thats the rule given in the Oxford English Dictionary, but on reflection it seems not wholly satisfactory. It doesnt work for outboard motor or rocket motor for example. And it doesnt explain why the two words should have been applied in this way. For that we have to look into their history.

Engine is from the Latin ingenium, which referred to ones ability to create things, ones native genius; it comes from a root meaning create; beget from which we get words like genetic, and is also the source of ingenious and ingenuity (engineer derives from a related word). Its first meaning in English, from about the fourteenth century, was very much this one of mother wit or genius, a skill in devising things. It could also, by obvious extension, refer to the result of such ingenuity, a contrivance or device, particularly any mechanical apparatus. The term was very general; a sixteenth-century text directs that a person should be put in the stocks or other such engine; pulleys and their like were also engines (as in Swifts Gullivers Travels of 1727: With ropes and engines, I made a shift to turn it). The British pub served its drink by means of beer engines, hand pumps which drew the brew up from casks in the cellar; blazes were extinguished with the help of fire engines, originally hand-operated pumps. In the 1670s one John Worlidge invented a machine for pulping apples in cidermaking; he termed his device the Ingenio, an obvious reference to the Latin original. Engine was commonly applied also to weapons of war, such as the siege engine and to devices such as snares for catching game (hence gin trap, where gin is a short form of engine that also turned up in compounds such as horse gin for a horse-powered windlass).

It was an obvious enough extension to apply the word to the new devices that created power through steam. At first these were static units designed to pump water from mines, hugely complicated even in their early Newcomen incarnations. The steam engine was such an important machine, being one of the crucial developments of the Industrial Revolution, in particular making possible deep mines, that engine soon came to apply almost exclusively to it (being replaced in most other cases by machine, a word that earlier had meant almost the same as engine). And that usage came to influence later extensions of it, as in petrol and diesel engines: no longer just a contrivance, but a system for producing propulsive power.

Incidentally, computer science has several terms that include engine, such as search engine, database engine and recognition engine. In all of them engine has the sense of a central part or kernel of a software application, hidden from the user, which does intensive number-crunching work on data, only the results of which are made available. Charles Babbage named his Victorian mechanical computer the Analytical Engine, using the pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of the word. I would guess, in view of the almost iconic regard many computer scientists have for Babbages work, that the modern terms derive directly from this phrase.

Motor had quite different origins, coming from the Latin movere, to move. It was first employed in English in the sense of instigator, or something that causes motion, often in a figurative sense, as of God as being the cause of the motion of the heavens. Even by the nineteenth century, it was still applied generally to the idea of something that caused change, without necessarily implying a mechanical device; for example the Civil Engineering Journal in 1839 said The true motor of the system would ... be the weight of the atmosphere, in which motor here is an agent or force (a sense which is still current). It was also applied early in the same century to classes of muscles or nerves whose job was to cause parts of the body to move. Only in the 1850s did it begin to be applied to a device that employed some source of energy to create movement, being applied first to the electric motor and to hydraulic devices.

When the electric motor appeared, people saw a key difference between it and the steam engine. The latter had an obvious source of energy in its fuel; the source of energy of the former was less clear, being supplied mysteriously from a battery or generator by means of wires. Steam engines obviously consumed their fuel, but electrical and hydraulic devices extracted energy from some source without obviously consuming it. Perhaps this reminded people of the original sense of motor that referred to some intangible or spiritual force, and persuaded them to apply it to these new sources of power.

By the time that vehicles driven by internal combustion engines had begun to appear in any numbers, at the very end of the century, both words had become well established in common usage. The driving force was obviously an engine, which consumed fuel to provide motive power. But why the conveyance as a whole was termed a motor vehicle is less obvious. The mere fact of it moving was obviously not sufficient; that was hardly a new idea, after all. It may be that it was a more elegant word, and also helpfully distinguished the automobile as a system from anything that belched steam and soot, such as the early steam-driven road vehicles like the Stanley Steamer.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the two words had moved together from very different origins, even though as weve seen, for historical reasons they were mostly employed in set compounds. But when new forms of propulsive device came along, analogy (or sometimes chance) decided which was to be applied in a particular case. Aeroplanes were obviously powered by engines, since the earliest ones were taken over directly from petrol engines of the kind that drove cars and lorries. Though there seems to be no clear evidence for the choice, perhaps outboard motor was so termed because it was a compact device that reminded its namers of electric motors.

The confusion between rocket engine and rocket motor is less obvious. By analogy with other devices that consume fuel, it ought to be an engine, but perhaps by the time it came to be named motor had become so close a synonym that either felt right.
Click to expand...

Bad Boattail, Sep 4, 2007

#17
GRIMM Well-Known Member

ou: :ball:

But the above makes me right, so i agree with it :TU:

GRIMM, Sep 4, 2007

#18
bob k. mando Guest

But the above makes me right, so i agree with it :TU:

cogent logic if ever i did see it.

bob k. mando, Sep 4, 2007

#19
jbc455 Between cars...

They're interchangeable with regards to cars. Call it whatever you want to- it's the same thing.

From dictionary.com:

motor /ˈmoʊtər/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[moh-ter]
noun 1. a comparatively small and powerful engine, esp. an internal-combustion engine in an automobile, motorboat, or the like.

engine /ˈɛndʒən/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[en-juhn]
noun 1. a machine for converting thermal energy into mechanical energy or power to produce force and motion.

jbc455, Sep 5, 2007

#20

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