heat engine

1. 1.

   any engine that makes use of heat to do work

   Broaderengine

   Narrowerexternal-combustion engineinternal-combustion engine

Questions about heat engine

What does heat engine mean?

heat engine means "any engine that makes use of heat to do work".

Is heat engine a common word?

heat engine is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.