This abecedarian is one engineer's collection of thoughts, quotations, anecdotes, facts, trivia, arcana, and miscellanea relating to the practice, history, culture, and traditions of his profession. The entries, which represent the distillation of decades of reading, writing, talking, and thinking about engineers and engineering, range from brief essays on concepts and practices that are central to the profession to lists of its great achievements. This book is at the same time an anthology, a commonplace book, and a reference volume.

My approach in composing the entries has generally been to convey as much information in as little space as possible, to create more of a dictionary-like than an encyclopedia-like sense of the topic under discussion. In no case is an entry meant to be definitive or exhaustive, and so references to further information are provided freely. However, I have included no references to the World Wide Web, not only because web sites can come, go, and change so unpredictably, but also because it can be easier to query a reliable search engine than to type in correctly a long web address.

This volume is not intended to be read from first page to last, but rather is meant to be dipped into here and there as the mood strikes the reader, with the alphabetical arrangement promoting serendipity. In time, it is hoped, this book will become the source to which readers come first when they encounter a vague or obscure reference to something related to the softer side of engineering.