Machine-hour
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The amount of work that can be done by one machine in one hour; a billable hour for one machine. (Said of, for example, a piece of heavy equipment or a machine tool.)
"With the right carbide tooling and toolpath programming, you're not looking at too many machine-hours for a job like this. If you're going to putz around with cheaper tooling and guesstimated feedrates, then you'll pay for those in more machine-hours."
- 2 a unit representing the operation of one machine for 1 hour; used in the determination of costs and economics. wordnet
Example
More examples"With the right carbide tooling and toolpath programming, you're not looking at too many machine-hours for a job like this. If you're going to putz around with cheaper tooling and guesstimated feedrates, then you'll pay for those in more machine-hours."
Etymology
Compound of machine + hour, although, as with any such unit of measure (e.g., ton-miles, newton metres), the mathematical relationship of multiplication is simultaneously involved: X machines working during Y hours = X × Y = Z machine-hours.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.