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engine


engine: n. 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'.

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'.