man engine

English

Noun

man engine (plural man engines)

1. A mechanical lift for raising or lowering people through considerable distances; specifically (mining) a contrivance by which miners ascend or descend in a shaft. It consists of a series of landings in the shaft and an equal number of shelves on a vertical rod which has an up and down motion equal to the distance between the successive landings. A man steps from a landing to a shelf and is lifted or lowered to the next landing, upon which he then steps, and so on, travelling by successive stages.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “man engine”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)

Anagrams

• engineman