On Aug 8, 11:46*am, Sarah Ehrett wrote:

LOL. *My dear Herr Krause, even rocket scientists debate the differences.

The first two paragraphs from the cited article.

"On the rare occasions we encounter one, we refer to a steam locomotive as
an engine, the same word that we give to the motive power of an aircraft.
But all electrical devices are driven by motors. In Britain at least, one’s
personal transport is a motor car (with compounds such as motor trade,
motor vehicle and motor sport), even though it’s always powered by an
engine. Small boats may have outboard motors and then are often called
motor boats.

However, the propulsion device of a rocket can be called either a rocket
motor or a rocket engine, and usage here seems not to have settled on one
or the other. The IEEE Spectrum magazine for June 1998 (which Ron Jeffries
has thoughtfully sent me) reports that the debate has been so intense, and
yet so inconclusive, that some rocket scientist has coined the phrase
whoosh generator as “the humorous, genderless, politically correct way to
refer to the propulsion device in a hobby rocket, thus avoiding the great
motor/engine debate”. "

(Yawn). This failed to wake me up, even *after* riding my
enginecycle to work on the engineway, this morning after staying up
late last night watching an enginesports telecast on TV.