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engine: n. 1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some function but can't be
used without some kind of front end. Today we have,
especially, print engine: the guts of
a laser printer. 2. An analogous piece of software; notionally, one that does a lot
of noisy crunching, such as a database
engine. The hacker senses of engine are
actually close to its original, pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill,
clever device, or instrument (the word is cognate to
‘ingenuity’). This sense had not been completely eclipsed by
the modern connotation of power-transducing machinery in Charles Babbage's
time, which explains why he named the stored-program computer that he
designed in 1844 the Analytical
Engine.
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