Word.ws English Dictionary

man engine

Syllables: man en·gineUK/ˈmæn‿ˌɛnd͡ʒɪn/

man engine noun: a mechanical lift for raising and lowering people through considerable distances; specifically (mining), a device by which miners ascend or descend in a shaft, consisting of a series of landings or sollars in the shaft and an equal number of shelves on a vertical rod which has an up and down motion equal to the distance between the successive landings. A person steps from a landing to a shelf and is raised or lowered to the next landing, upon which they then step, and so on, travelling by successive stages.

Noun

man engine (plural man engines)

  1. (historical) A mechanical lift for raising and lowering people through considerable distances; specifically (mining), a device by which miners ascend or descend in a shaft, consisting of a series of landings or sollars in the shaft and an equal number of shelves on a vertical rod which has an up and down motion equal to the distance between the successive landings. A person steps from a landing to a shelf and is raised or lowered to the next landing, upon which they then step, and so on, travelling by successive stages.
    • The man-engine was like some gigantic prehistoric monster. I'll never forget the first time I saw the man-engine at the Levant. The captain took me to the edge of the shaft and explained to me how the mechanism worked. "The wooden rod plunges, see—up, down, up, down. Up twelve feet, down twelve...1971, Susan Howatch, chapter 1, in Penmarric, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, →OCLC, part IV (Philip: 1914–1930: Truth and Falsehood), section 3, page 371

Forms of man engine

pluralman engines
alternative formman-engine

Origin of man engine

From man (noun) + engine (noun), referring to an engine for raising or lowering people.

Questions about man engine

What does man engine mean?
Man engine means a mechanical lift for raising and lowering people through considerable distances; specifically (mining), a device by which miners ascend or descend in a shaft, consisting of a series of landings or sollars in the shaft and an equal number of shelves on a vertical rod which has an up and down motion equal to the distance between the successive landings. A person steps from a landing to a shelf and is raised or lowered to the next landing, upon which they then step, and so on, travelling by successive stages.
What part of speech is man engine?
Man engine is a noun.
How do you pronounce man engine?
Man engine is pronounced /ˈmæn‿ˌɛnd͡ʒɪn/ (UK).
What is the plural of man engine?
The plural of man engine is man engines.

Words near man engine in the dictionary

  1. man date
  2. man dates
  3. man day
  4. man days
  5. man down
  6. man engine
  7. man engines
  8. man enough
  9. man fern
  10. man ferns
  11. man flu

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: man engine (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-man engine.wav.

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