Fire protection in buildings

Most of this list is the vocabulary of the building rather than of the fire: walls, doors, dampers and ducts that hold a fire in one place for long enough. One entry explains why so much of it is about air. Die Verrauchung is the smoke-logging of a stairway or corridor, and it often closes an escape route long before any flame reaches it. The word rests on der Rauch, and English has the same word without recognising it. Rauch and ‘reek’ come from one Germanic root for smoke and vapour. In England the word slid from the smoke to its smell, so something that reeks now simply stinks; Scots kept the older sense, and a chimney’s reek is still its smoke. German divided the family the other way: der Rauch stayed with the fire, and the related verb riechen, to smell, took the nose.