Tunnelling

One word on this page is English in disguise. Der Tübbing is the curved precast segment that a tunnel boring machine sets in place behind itself, ring after ring. German took the word from the English mining term « tubbing », the lining of rings that held back the water in a shaft, and « tubbing » in turn is built on « tub ». German kept the word and carried it into the age of the boring machine; on an English-speaking drive the same piece is now simply a « segment ». So an English speaker on a German site hears Tübbing as foreign and is hearing their own language, respelt with an umlaut and given a German plural, die Tübbinge. The rest of the list is home-grown, and much of it old miners’ German: die Firste above, die Ulme at the sides, das Haufwerk on the floor after the blast.