Gem box, mud ring, smurf tube: the electrician's nickname dictionary
Electricians name almost everything twice, once on the drawings and once on the job. This is the jobsite half, sorted by where you will hear it.
The new apprentice gets a list on the first morning: "Ten gem boxes, a box of mud rings, four sticks of half-inch and a coil of smurf tube." None of those words is printed on the supply house invoice, and every one of them is perfectly clear to the crew. Electricians name almost everything twice: once on the drawings, in the language of the code and the catalog, and once on the job, with a nickname that is shorter, funnier or older than the official term. Learn the second set and the jobsite stops sounding like a foreign language.
Boxes, rings and the plates that hide mistakes
Most of the nicknames live in the box aisle. The four-square box is the commercial workhorse, a steel square 4 inches on a side. On its own it has no place to mount a device, so it gets a mud ring, a raised cover named for the drywall mud and plaster that finishers bring right up to its edge. When the wire is heavy and the box is crowded, someone calls for a four-eleven box, named for its 4-11/16 inch size.
The gem box from the morning list is a single-gang metal box with removable sides, so three of them can be ganged into one wide box for a row of switches. On a block wall, where the box sits on the surface, the choice is a handy box with rounded corners. Outside it is a bell box, cast and weatherproof with threaded hubs. Under a fixture with no depth to spare, it is a pancake box, about half an inch deep.
Then come the parts named after mistakes. A box set too deep behind the drywall gets a goof ring to bring it back out flush. A hole cut too big or too ragged gets a goof plate, an oversized cover that hides the damage. Nobody wants to be the one who needs a goof plate, and every trim crew carries a few anyway.
Conduit by any other name
Conduit is pipe to most electricians, and installing it is "piping it." The thin-wall steel tube on most commercial jobs is EMT, the heavy threaded stuff is rigid, and flexible metal conduit is greenfield, or Sealtite when it wears a gray plastic jacket for motors and wet spots. Armored cable comes in two kinds that sound alike and are not. BX is Type AC, where the armor and a thin bonding strip carry the ground. MC cable has an insulated green ground inside the armor, and it is what most commercial drawings call for, even when the crew says BX for both. House wiring is Romex, a brand name that swallowed a whole product category.
Bending pipe has its own vocabulary. A ninety turns the run a full corner. An offset jogs it sideways to clear a beam or enter a box. A kicker is one shallow bend that angles it off its line. When two bends in the same stick end up out of plane, the result is a dog leg, and everyone within earshot hears about it: "That's got a dog leg in it. It'll never lay flat on the strut."
Fittings collect names too. An LB is the conduit body that turns a run through a wall, and an Erickson is the three-piece union that joins two lengths of rigid when neither one can turn. Every box and panel has a KO, or knockout, and every knockout leaves a slug, the little steel disc that ends up underfoot and in the bottom of every panel.
The tool pouch
Hand tools mostly go by brand. Kleins are the side cutters, Channellocks the adjustable pliers, and dikes the diagonal cutters for snipping ties close. The hammer is occasionally the persuader, reserved for parts that need convincing.
Testers are where the nicknames get affectionate. The wiggy is a solenoid tester whose plunger buzzes and jumps when it finds voltage, and old hands trust it because it is hard to fool. The tick tracer is the pen in the shirt pocket that beeps near a live wire. And a megger is both the insulation tester and the verb: "Megger that feeder before anyone hooks it up."
Pulling wire brings out the rest. The fish tape goes in first, the tugger does the heavy pulling, and Yellow 77 gets smeared on the conductors so they slide.
Wire talk
The live conductor is hot, and anything energized is hot too. In a crowded box, several wires get joined with a wire nut or a Wago lever connector, plus a pigtail so only one lead goes to the device. Doing all of that and folding it neatly back into the box is to make up the box: "Make up everything on two, trim starts tomorrow." The matching verb for terminating a wire on a breaker or lug is land.
Lighting circuits add two more. The switch leg carries switched power from the switch to the light. A traveler is one of the two wires between three-way switches. Heavy conductors get spliced with a bug, a split bolt that looks like a beetle once it is taped up. Lay-in fixtures in the ceiling grid connect through a whip, a short flexible assembly with the wires already in it.
People, inspectors and close calls
An electrician is a sparky to every other trade on site. A licensed journeyman is a jman on the job, as in "ask your jman before you open that panel." Linemen call inside wiremen narrow backs, and an electrician who follows big projects from city to city is a boomer. Someone who does sloppy, unsafe work is a hack, and so is the work.
The code book is the bible, and the inspector reads from it. Fail an inspection and the job gets a red tag. One of the classic reasons is a double tap, two wires under a breaker terminal made for one.
Then there are the words for when things go wrong. To get bit is to take a shock. The electricity that did the biting is, in the trade's gallows humor, the angry pixies. Both are said with a grin, and both are meant as warnings.
Five nicknames to learn first
- Gem box: the single-gang metal device box that gangs together.
- Mud ring: the raised cover that turns a four-square box into a device box.
- Stick: one 10-foot length of conduit, the unit crews count pipe in.
- Make up: splice and fold the wires so the box is ready for a device.
- Wiggy: the rugged solenoid tester that tells you, loudly, that a wire is hot.