Electrical Slang

What do a "bug" and a "cherry" have in common?

They are both electrical slang terms!

We were recently contacted by Jared Coleson, of Elliott Electric Supply, who's created a website of electrical slang terms. Whether you are an electrician, contractor, or just someone trying to understand what your local electrician is jabbering about, you can use the glossary to learn trade slang and electrical jargon. Baffled by a term you just overheard? Type it in the search box at the top and flip the switch!

Here's Jared's story:

I’ve been a software developer at Elliott Electric Supply for 15 years and throughout my career one of the most common complaints from non-electricians is that they just don’t understand the terminology electricians use. And when electricians look at our website, invoices, or cut sheets they complain that we aren’t using their terminology. The manufacturers encourage the use of either their brand names or generic scientific terms. But try as they might, those just aren’t the terms your average electrician uses every day. Which leads to confusion when electricians and non-electricians try to talk about material together.

Slang has always been an obvious training issue for our sales people, but it goes beyond that. When visiting with customers, I’m often in discussions with their own office personnel who are frustrated that they don’t understand the electricians who work with them. They’ll end up in frustrating situations where they’re told to look for receipts for goof plates, but all they can find are receipts for jumbo plates. That may be a silly example, but it happens all the time.

We knew we needed to add slang terms to our own website and internal software, but after discussing it we felt we had an opportunity to do more. Instead of just adding slang terms to www.ElliottElectric.com we decided to create a site that could be more easily used by the industry as a whole. This really is one of those tools where the more people that contribute, the better it is. So to create the best resource, we needed to create something that could be used by new electricians, non-electricians working for electrical contractors, and even sales people at other supply houses.

I remembered using a website called Trade Slang several years ago to help test our website that did just that. At the time I found it really helpful. Unfortunately it no longer exists. But one of the developers on my team was able to find and contact the owner and get a list of their terms. With that trade slang’s data and input from our own sales force, we designed a new modern website that would serve as a thesaurus of electrical slang for everyone.

You can read a brief version of our story here: www.electricalslang.com/About . We have over 800 terms on so far, and continue to add more.

To contact Jared, email JaredColeson@elliottelectric.com or visit their website by clicking here to contribute.