engine

n. machine which supplies force and motion, motor; locomotive; part of a program which handles certain types of data (Computers)

An engine is something that produces an output effect from a given input. The origin of engineering however, came from the design, building and working of (military "engines") because before such devices came to be employed in battles there were very few mechanical devices used. Military engines included siege engines, large catapults, trebuchets, battering rams etc. So the first engineers were military engineers, then later as engineering developed, there came civil engineers. These were engineers who dealt with designing, building and commissioning roads, bridges, docks and wharves, large public and private buildings.
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n. offing

(v. t.)
To rack; to torture.
  

(v. t.)
To equip with an engine; -- said especially of steam vessels; as, vessels are often built by one firm and engined by another.
  

(v. t.)
To assault with an engine.
  

(n.)
Natural capacity; ability; skill.
  

(n.)
Anything used to effect a purpose; any device or contrivance; an agent.
  

(n.)
Any instrument by which any effect is produced; especially, an instrument or machine of war or torture.
  

(n.)
A compound machine by which any physical power is applied to produce a given physical effect.
  

<jargon> 1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some function but can't be used without some kind of front end. Today we have, especially, "print engine": the guts of a laser printer.
2. An analogous piece of software; notionally, one that does a lot of noisy crunching, such as a "database engine", or "search engine".
The hackish senses of "engine" are actually close to its original, pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever device, or instrument (the word is cognate to "ingenuity"). This sense had not been completely eclipsed by the modern connotation of power-transducing machinery in Charles Babbage's time, which explains why he named the stored-program computer that he designed in 1844 the "Analytical Engine".
[Jargon File]
(1996-05-31)