Cog

A cog, is one of the teeth of a gear; the tooth-like parts of gears that fit together with other gears and make each other move.

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Word of the Day: Cog

A cog is part of a gear.

Most people know what a gear looks like.

You can see it in the picture accompanying this post, or if you have some small change in your pocket, you can look at a five-yen coin.

There is a stalk of wheat and water on the five yen coin, and around the hole in the middle, there is a gear.

We can quickly tell that it’s a gear by the teeth.

So there you have it, cogs, those little pieces that stick out, are the teeth of a gear; they’re the tooth-like parts of gears that fit together with other gears and make each other move.

They are tiny but essential parts of a machine.

If one little cog breaks, the machine will fail to work correctly.

It might even stop working altogether.

Why do you need to know this?

Well, if I didn’t first explain today’s word, then you wouldn’t understand what the idiom a cog in the machine means.


This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 87.

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.



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