Word.ws English Dictionary

machine-hour

machine-hour noun: the amount of work that can be done by one machine in one hour; a billable hour for one machine. (Said of, for example, a piece of heavy equipment or a machine tool.).

Noun

machine-hour (plural machine-hours)

  1. The amount of work that can be done by one machine in one hour; a billable hour for one machine. (Said of, for example, a piece of heavy equipment or a machine tool.)
    • With the right carbide tooling and toolpath programming, you're not looking at too many machine-hours for a job like this. If you're going to putz around with cheaper tooling and guesstimated feedrates, then you'll pay for those in more machine-hours.

Forms of machine-hour

pluralmachine-hours

Origin of machine-hour

Compound of machine + hour, although, as with any such unit of measure (e.g., ton-miles, newton metres), the mathematical relationship of multiplication is simultaneously involved: X machines working during Y hours = X × Y = Z machine-hours.

Questions about machine-hour

What does machine-hour mean?
Machine-hour means the amount of work that can be done by one machine in one hour; a billable hour for one machine. (Said of, for example, a piece of heavy equipment or a machine tool.).
What part of speech is machine-hour?
Machine-hour is a noun.
What is the plural of machine-hour?
The plural of machine-hour is machine-hours.

Words near machine-hour in the dictionary

  1. machine-gunned
  2. machine-gunner
  3. machine-gunners
  4. machine-gunning
  5. machine-guns
  6. machine-hour
  7. machine-hours
  8. machine-made
  9. machine-paced
  10. machine-readable
  11. machine-translate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: machine-hour (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “machine-hour.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/machine-hour. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.