In woodworking and construction, a nail is a small object made of metal which is used as a fastener, as a peg to hang something, or sometimes as a decoration. Generally, nails have a sharp point on one end and a flattened head on the other, but headless nails are available. Nails are made in a great variety of forms for specialized purposes. The most common is a wire nail. Other types of nails include pins, tacks, brads, spikes, and cleats.
Barbecue or barbeque is a term used with significant regional and national variations to describe various cooking methods that employ live fire and smoke to cook the food. The term is also generally applied to the devices associated with those methods, the broader cuisines that these methods produce, and the meals or gatherings at which this style of food is cooked and served. The cooking methods associated with barbecuing vary significantly but most involve outdoor cooking.
The symbol # is known variously in English-speaking regions as the number sign, hash, or pound sign. The symbol has historically been used for a wide range of purposes including the designation of an ordinal number and as a ligatured abbreviation for pounds avoirdupois – having been derived from the now-rare ℔.
Lapidary is the practice of shaping stone, minerals, or gemstones into decorative items such as cabochons, engraved gems, and faceted designs. A person who practices lapidary is known as a lapidarist. A lapidarist uses the lapidary techniques of cutting, grinding, and polishing. Hardstone carving requires specialized carving techniques.
In woodworking, a rip-cut is a type of cut that severs or divides a piece of wood parallel to the grain. The other typical type of cut is a cross-cut, a cut perpendicular to the grain. Unlike cross-cutting, which shears the wood fibers, a rip saw works more like a series of chisels, lifting off small splinters of wood. The nature of the wood grain requires the shape of the saw teeth to be different, thus the need for both rip saws and crosscut saws; however, some circular saw blades are combination blades and can make both types of cuts. A rip cut is the fundamental type of cut made at a sawmill.
A gadget is a mechanical device or any ingenious article. Gadgets are sometimes referred to as gizmos.
Pikey is an ethnic slur referring to Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people. It is used mainly in the United Kingdom and in Ireland to refer to people who belong to groups which had a traditional travelling lifestyle. Groups referred to with this term include Irish Travellers, English Gypsies, Welsh Kale, Scottish Lowland Travellers, Scottish Highland Travellers, and Funfair Travellers. These groups consider the term to be highly offensive.
A joist is a horizontal structural member used in framing to span an open space, often between beams that subsequently transfer loads to vertical members. When incorporated into a floor framing system, joists serve to provide stiffness to the subfloor sheathing, allowing it to function as a horizontal diaphragm. Joists are often doubled or tripled, placed side by side, where conditions warrant, such as where wall partitions require support.
In woodworking, a saw-horse or sawhorse is a trestle structure used to support a board or plank for sawing. A pair of sawhorses can support a plank, forming a scaffold. In certain circles, it is also known as a mule and a short sawhorse is known as a pony. The names come from the shape of the frame, which resembles a horse. A sawhorse may also be a rack for supporting logs for sawing, known in the US as a sawbuck.
A lath or slat is a thin, narrow strip of straight-grained wood used under roof shingles or tiles, on lath and plaster walls and ceilings to hold plaster, and in lattice and trellis work.
A bucksaw is a hand-powered frame saw similar to bow saw and generally used with a sawbuck to cut logs or firewood to length (bucking). Modern bucksaws usually have a metal frame and a removable blade with coarse teeth held in tension by the frame. Lightweight portable or foldable models used for camping or back-packing are also available. It is often referred to as a bow saw in the North American hardware market, but that term traditionally refers to a different type of saw with a wooden frame.
A mitre box or miter box is a wood working appliance used to guide a hand saw for making precise cuts, usually 45° mitre cuts. Traditional mitre boxes are simple in construction and made of wood, while adjustable mitre boxes are made of metal and can be adjusted for cutting any angle from 45° to 90°.
Wood grain is the longitudinal arrangement of wood fibers or the pattern resulting from such an arrangement. It has various derived terms refer to different aspects of the fibers or patterns. Wood grain is important in woodworking and it impacts aesthetics.
Shoring is the process of temporarily supporting a building, vessel, structure, or trench with shores (props) when in danger of collapse or during repairs or alterations. Shoring comes from shore, a timber or metal prop. Shoring may be vertical, angled, or horizontal.
In construction, furring are strips of wood or other material applied to a structure to level or raise the surface, to prevent dampness, to make space for insulation, to level and resurface ceilings or walls, or to increase the beam of a wooden ship. Furring refers to the process of installing the strips and to the strips themselves. Firring is a U.K. term for wood strips which are usually 50 mm wide, tapered and fixed above wood roof joists to provide drainage falls below roof boarding. Furring strips themselves are typically referred to as battens in the U.K. and sometimes the material is called strapping in the U.S.
A literary trope is the use of figurative language, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect such as using a figure of speech. Keith and Lundburg describe a trope as "a substitution of a word or phrase by a less literal word or phrase". The word trope has also undergone a semantic change and now also describes commonly recurring or overused literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés in creative works. Literary tropes span almost every category of writing, such as poetry, film, plays, and video games.
Felling is the process of cutting down trees, an element of the task of logging. The person cutting the trees is a lumberjack. A feller buncher is a machine capable of felling a single large tree or grouping and felling several small ones simultaneously.
Medullary rays, also known as vascular rays or pith rays, are cellular structures found in some species of wood. They appear as radial planar structures, perpendicular to the growth rings, which are visible to the naked eye. In a transverse section they appear as radiating lines from the centre of the log. In an axial section they may appear as a variety of transverse markings, depending on how close the section is to the plane of the ray. In a tangential section they may be hard to see at all.
Slang terms for money often derive from the appearance and features of banknotes or coins, their values, historical associations or the units of currency concerned. Within a language community, some of the slang terms vary in social, ethnic, economic, and geographic strata but others have become the dominant way of referring to the currency and are regarded as mainstream, acceptable language.
Sawyer is an occupational term referring to someone who saws wood, particularly using a pitsaw either in a saw pit or with the log on trestles above ground or operates a sawmill. One such job is the occupation of someone who cuts lumber to length for the consumer market, a task now often done by end users or at lumber and home improvement stores.
