Pipeline engineering

The fifth entry is a soldadura circunferencial, and in English it is « the girth weld », a name with nothing Latin in it. The Portuguese adjective shows its parts to anybody who looks, circum and ferre, carried around. The English noun goes back instead to the old verb « to gird », to bind something round the middle — the verb of a sword worn at the waist and of « girding one’s loins ». From it came « a girdle », which is the belt itself, and « the girth », which was first the strap passing under a horse and only afterwards the measurement round a tree or a waist. The same verb gave the builder « a girder », the beam that braces a frame. So the weld that runs right round a pipe is named after a belt, while the one running along it is « the seam weld », named after the sewing of cloth. That is the habit worth taking away from this page: where Portuguese reaches for a long Latin adjective, English keeps a short Germanic noun for the same shape.