Word.ws English Dictionary

tombstone engineering

tombstone engineering noun: the practice of letting accidents or failures (perhaps occasioning death, but not necessarily) identify engineering problems.

Noun

tombstone engineering (uncountable)

  1. (slang) The practice of letting accidents or failures (perhaps occasioning death, but not necessarily) identify engineering problems.
    • “As pilots in the USAF, we used the term ‘Tombstone Engineering’ to describe a known potential catastrophic flight event that could have been avoided through additional design and funding, but ended in the death of pilots and/or aircrews, thus forcing that design change/aircraft modification....2024 March 19, Mary Baily, “Digital Access”, in Sand Mountain Reporter

Questions about tombstone engineering

What does tombstone engineering mean?
Tombstone engineering means the practice of letting accidents or failures (perhaps occasioning death, but not necessarily) identify engineering problems.
What part of speech is tombstone engineering?
Tombstone engineering is a noun.

Words near tombstone engineering in the dictionary

  1. tomboys
  2. tombozine
  3. tombs
  4. tombsful
  5. tombstone
  6. tombstone engineering
  7. tombstoned
  8. tombstoner
  9. tombstoners
  10. tombstones
  11. tombstoning

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tombstone engineering (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: “tombstone engineering.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tombstone_engineering. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.