Plumbing engineering in Italian

Entry four is il dimensionamento delle tubazioni, and the noun at the end is worth more than the calculation in front of it. Italian keeps two words here where we make do with one. Il tubo is the single physical object, the length you can pick up and carry. La tubazione is the run taken as a system, everything from the riser to the last branch, and it is the word a specification uses, which is why the plural le tubazioni is what stands on a drawing. Our « pipework » or « piping » does that second job, and rendering le tubazioni as « the tubes » turns a building services drawing into a laboratory. Which brings up the trap. « Tube » looks like il tubo and covers almost none of it: in English a water pipe is a « pipe », while « tube » has drifted to the toothpaste tube, which is un tubetto di dentifricio, to the inner tube of a bicycle, and to the London Underground. Size it as a tubazione, buy it as a tubo, and never call it a tube.