Word Pronunciation & Dictionary

engineer's disease

Word Rarity Rare

Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.57 in modern English

Syllables: en-gi-neer's dis-ease
IPA

18

Scrabble Score

16

Letters

4

Syllables

8

Unique Chars

Meaning

noun

A bias of technical professionals who think that their expertise allows them to solve problems in unrelated fields.

Uncountable

noun

A tendency for engineers to be protective and perfectionist about their work.

Uncountable

Example Sentences

"The idea of “engineer’s disease” developed while I (Graham) was talking with a crew of project managers. I was talking about Legionnaires’ disease, and they thought I said “engineer’s disease.”"
"Humanities denial is enabled—and enables—another affliction that’s endemic within the tech industry: “engineer’s disease,” the belief that expertise in one field (usually in STEM) makes you an expert on everything else too."
"Revealing the workings of a machine, without disclosing what the machine does, is a classic symptom of engineer’s disease."
"After that, I started working on a debugger and a Fortran compiler, but got bogged down with engineer’s disease (kept designing to get it perfect, but never actually finishing) so never finished."

Usage

Uncountable

Questions

What does engineer's disease mean?: A bias of technical professionals who think that their expertise allows them to solve problems in unrelated fields.

How to pronounce engineer's disease

Open the pronunciation page — Open the Speakur entry for “engineer's disease”.
Read the phonetic spelling — Read the IPA spelling () so you know which sounds to aim for.
Play the audio — Click Play to hear reference audio for “engineer's disease”.
Repeat and practice — Say “engineer's disease” aloud, matching stress and vowels until it feels natural.