mechanicals
- 1Plural of mechanical.
The inspector noted that the building's mechanicals needed replacing.
Vintage cars demand owners who understand their mechanicals intimately.
Note
An ordinary -s plural, so it carries every meaning of the singular: camera-ready layouts in printing, manual laborers in the mold of Shakespeare's rude mechanicals, robots, mechanical engineers, organ stops, even instances of equipment failure. Keep it apart from a building's systems and recording royalties. Those exist only in the plural: one mechanical can be a single layout or laborer, but never a single royalty.
- 2The fixtures and fittings of a building that make up its mechanical systems, such as heating, plumbing, and ventilation.
Like the organs of a body: hidden systems that keep the whole structure alive and working.
The renovation budget mostly went toward upgrading the mechanicals.
Inspectors flagged the aging mechanicals in the old factory.
Similarsystems, services, utilities
Note
An American trade word, at home in home inspections and remodeling talk, where it sits beside floor space and headroom as a constraint to plan around. It has no singular and takes a plural verb: the mechanicals are sound. The word also stretches past buildings to the working hardware of a machine, such as a telescope's mirror cell and focuser, or the car that survives a canyon plunge in Roderick Thorp's Rainbow Drive (2014).
- 3Royalties earned on the sale of recordings issued as records, CDs, tapes, or similar physical objects.
Like an author earning a cut on every printed book that leaves the shelf.
Streaming has cut into the mechanicals that once flowed from CD sales.
Her publisher collected the mechanicals from every pressing of the single.
Note
Music-publishing shorthand for one stream of a songwriter's income: the money record companies pay publishers for songs pressed onto records, CDs and tapes. It stands apart from performance royalties, which are earned when a song is played on radio or television, and from income from downloads and streaming. The word is always plural, so a publisher collects mechanicals but never a single mechanical. It is trade jargon, usually explained for outsiders.
mechanicals is a form of mechanical
mechanical, noun: An engineer who specializes in the design and construction of machinery. Full entry
- Forms
- mechanicalmechanicals plural
- Spelling
- mechanical → mechanicals: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /z/.
Practice
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