It’s always cracked me up and/or annoyed me that relatively simple electrical and electronic components are known by peculiar names in some fields.
The classic one is the “condenser” in a car’s point-type ignition. Yes, condenser was the old-old school term for them, but the rest of the world knows them as capacitors.
In doing some AC work recently, I discovered that the black box that goes on the outside compressor unit and allows the 24VAC control system to switch its high power on and off is called… no, not a relay, which is what most of the world calls it. Nope. In HVAC, it’s a “contactor.” Sometimes a “magnetic contactor,” as if there’s any other kind of electrically-operated relay.
A couple of others are lingering on my memory but I can’t bring them to mind. Oh, yeah - “solenoid” for a heavy-duty switch.
Brake has a number of different meanings, some may be related. It can be a device for bending metal, a device for breaking up soil although still spelled ‘brake’, and the modern concept of a stopping device. Some of these forms may have similar roots.
This is because, for an engineer, the letter ‘i’ is used for electrical current, which begins with the letter ‘c’.
I have one from medicine: The unit of volume in medicine is the ‘cc’, or cubic centimeter. This is what the entire rest of the metricated world knows as the mL, or milliliter, but the medical people in my experience are not changing, and will happily work in thousands of ccs instead of switching to liters. (Litres are Right Out.)
I chanced to meet an Australian while riding on Amtrak a couple weeks ago. While we were talking about this and that, he mentioned something about how many kilowatts he was saving though some home improvement or other: he then looked at me a little uncertainly as though I might not be used to that unit of measurement, it being metric and all. I assured him that yes, Americans use that for electricity… but usually use horsepower for other power measurements. Thankfully, he did not ask why. I sure as heck couldn’t say why.
Actually, the j used by electrical engineers is equal to -i, as used by physicists.
On a related note, I find it annoying when a technical term is appropriated by the mainstream to mean something different, for example: “organic”, “growing exponentially” and “quantum leap.”
I think some are getting confused here. The OP is asking for an item that has different names in different fields, not words that are used differently.
The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is a CMU block. Architects use that (concrete masonry unit) whereas laypeople call them “cinder blocks”.
It’s a little archaic, but I have references around here to a big switch that actuates heavy machinery through things like relays as… a solenoid. Perhaps a case of the function transferring to the function-ator.
Historically, a solenoid was a simple short-throw linear motor. A contactor was a high power electrical switch, typically moved mechanically by a solenoid. A relay was a low-powered contactor which may have used an electromagnetic mechanism other than a solenoid.
The terms were clear and distinct in EE. Non technical workers out in the field have been colloquially misusing nearby terms as synonyms since the advent of the first hand axe.
Now of course we have “solid state relays” which preserve the gross idea of relay: “use one electrical circuit to switch another”, but lack the moving parts and don’t rely on electromagnetism for their working action.