Word for group of professionals

I agree that groups of programmers or software developers are usually referred to as teams, although that does have the nuance that they’re working on the same project or for the same company.

If they’re not related in that way, it’d just be a «group» of programmers. For example, you might encounter groups of programmers at a programming-related or technology-related convention.

Really, there’s no fancy or unusual term for them. If you’re being poetic you could make something up, like an «arrogance of programmers»!

As for your second question, there is no «graphy» word related to programming. A person who makes software programs, and is a programmer.

A person can study choreography, or cinematography, or they can study programming. If you’re fancy, you can call «programming» «software development» instead, but «programming» fills the same niche that the other two words do for their industries.

A sub-type of programmer will sometimes have the word «architect» appended to their title or description. Others will have «engineer». Perhaps that’s what you’re going for? But titles are highly interchangeable in the industry now and there’s not any formalized definition between programmer titles (programmer vs. developer vs. engineer vs. architect) that isn’t tied to whatever a specific company’s HR department decides.

Source: Worked in IT for 10 years. Met a lot of programmers!

At work, you want to sound smarter and more confident with your English. And you certainly want to use professional English terms that can help you achieve these goals.

Our post today is going to focus on 12 words that will help enrich your English vocabulary so that you are able to arm yourself with professional English words at work.

I’ll give you lots of examples and tips on when and how to use each word, too! Let’s start, shall we?

1. A Smarter Way to Say Okay: Certainly

Instead of saying the basic “Yes” or “Okay”, make use of the word “Certainly” in your interactions and communication at work. It can also be an alternative to saying “definitely”.

“I am certainly learning a lot of things here.”

“No problem, I can certainly do that for you!”

“I’ll certainly be there!”

2. Professional English Version of Change: Modify

Another word that will help you sound more professional is “modify”. You can use this when talking about schedules, timelines, reports, and more work components. It’s certainly a very easy to understand and easy to use word. You see what I did there?

“We have to modify this report based on our discussion earlier.”

“Could you modify the timeline of the project?”

“Do you want me to modify the plan we will be presenting to the team?”

3. Instead of Saying Goals, Use a More Professional English Alternative: Objectives

It’s a common thing to have goals at work, of course. But the word “Goals” being a bit basic, you can replace it with “Objectives”.

You can definitely use this in reports and presentations and you will sound more professional and more prepared at the office.

It’s very similar to the word “Aspirations”, although it’s more appropriate to use this when you talk about personal dreams and goals.

“The objectives of our training today are as follows…”

“This data meets our objectives, I am impressed!”

“I have a question on one of the objectives you have stated.”

“My career aspirations include being the Department Manager in five years.”

4. A Stronger Word for Guess: Imagine

Instead of saying “I guess that will work” or “I guess we will succeed”, form stronger Professional English lines with the word “Imagine”.

Not only does it sound more proficient and skilled, it makes you sound like a visionary too!

“I imagine this idea will work!”

“I imagine we will succeed in this project!”

5. Think About It: Consider

Another basic word you can replace is the word “Think”. Switch it with a more solid and more convincing professional English word: “Consider”.

“Let’s consider all possible outcomes for this project.”

“Will you consider changing the format of this report?”

6. Use this Word at Work: Elaborate

Sometimes in meetings and discussions, you’ll lose grasp on an idea or thought or what the other person is talking about. It happens to the best of us. But instead of being too direct and asking “What do you mean?”, compose what you will say in a more professional way, with the use of the word “Elaborate”.

It’s also a better way of saying “could you tell me more about this?” or “could you discuss this again”.

“Could you elaborate on this section please?”

“Do you mind elaborating on the second objective?”

“Would you like me to elaborate further on this last item here?”

7. The Professional English Version of the Word Happen: Arise

Don’t say the word “happen”. Instead, use the word “arise” to have your sentences and lines sound more professional.

“We have some unforeseen circumstances arise, I need to move this meeting.”

“Thankfully, no complications have arisen.”

8. Level-up Your Results: Use the Word “Ramification”

Wow, this is indeed a step up to the already professional English word “results”. “Ramification” takes it a notch higher and you will definitely catch the attention of those whom you are talking or communicating to.

Take note though, that the word “ramification” has a negative connotation. So be careful when you use it and make sure it helps you sound more professional AND clearer.

“If we modify the timeline now, the ramifications could be severe.”

“That missed step in processing has ramifications.”

9. Don’t Ask for Opinions, Ask for Perspectives

Or you can also use the word “prerogatives”. You can use both words when asking for feedback and inputs from your colleagues and workmates or your bosses. Or the other way around too, when you would like to share your own opinion, as well.

“What’s your perspective on this matter?”

“Is it alright if I express my prerogative on this item?”

10. You Can Also Use the Word: Consensus

Perspective and prerogative is more suited when you are dealing with individuals. But when you are asking for the opinion of a team or a group of people, the more professional English word to use is “consensus”.

“We’d like the team’s consensus on the new workshop schedule.”

“Before we implement this new process, let’s hear the group’s consensus.”

11. Don’t Say “Easy”, Say “Straightforward”

Straightforward means uncomplicated and simple. But there’s no need to make it sound that way, especially when you are at the workplace and are aspiring to sound more professional and proficient.

“This is a pretty straightforward task.”

“The instructions are very straightforward, you’ll have no problem following them.”

12. A Professional English Solution to the Common Filler “Like”

Let’s face it, “like” is a really overused and common filler. And if you can avoid using it in professional situations you’ll most definitely benefit from doing so.

It makes you sound unprofessional and unprepared. Instead of using “like”, use more solid and professional phrases such as “such as” or “for example” or “for instance”.

“Let’s modify the colors in this design. For instance, more green and blue.”

“I think we can add more diverse characters. For example, a different model in this section here.”

Alright! So you’re now equipped with a more professional English vocabulary you can arm yourself at work. Practice these words and perfect them, okay?

By the way, here’s a post that you can supplement with this lesson. It will give you more business english phrases that can take your skills to a more advanced level!

Enjoy! And see you on the next lesson post!

To work together in Word for the web, you edit a document as you normally would. If others are also editing it, Word for the web alerts you to their presence, and shows you the paragraph they’re working on. There’s no special co-authoring mode and no command to begin co-authoring.

As authors come and go, Word for the web notifies you briefly.

You can always see who is currently working in the document by clicking near the top of the window.

A colored indicator shows you where others are editing the document.

Opening the document in your desktop application

If you want to make changes that require features of the Word desktop application, click Open in Word and continue editing. For example, you might want to add a table of contents or a bibliography whose entries update automatically.

Note: Co-authoring in the Word desktop application requires Word 2010, Word 2013, or Microsoft Word for Mac 2011.

In the Word desktop application, be careful not to introduce content or functionality to the document that will prevent other authors from editing the document in Word for the web. For example, don’t use permission features such as editing restrictions or marking the document as final. If you want to restrict access to the document, use the permission features where the document is stored (OneDrive, Microsoft 365, or SharePoint).

If someone does save the document with features that aren’t supported by Word for the web, you can still co-author, just not in Word for the web anymore. If everyone in the group has Word 2010, Word 2013, or Word for Mac 2011, continue working together in Word (click Open in Word and continue editing).

If someone in the group doesn’t have one of those versions of Word, you need to remove the unsupported features from the document so that everyone can continue to work together in Word for the web. Do the following:

1. In Word for the web, click Open in Word (requires Word 2003, or later, or Word for Mac 2008 12.2.9 or later).

2. In the Word desktop application, remove the unsupported features. For details about what’s supported, see Differences between using a document in the browser and in Word.

3. Save the document (press Ctrl+S in Windows, or ⌘+S on the Mac).

4. If you used Word 2003, Word 2007, or Word for Mac 2008 12.2.9, close Word so that others can continue co-authoring the document in Word for the web.

   If another author saves the document with unsupported features before you have saved the document in Word for the web, you might not be able to save your work in Word for the web. If you have Word 2010, Word 2013, or Word for Mac 2011 you can prevent losing your changes by opening the document in the Word desktop application. Click Open in Word, copy your changes from Word for the web, and then paste them in the document in Word. When you save the document in Word, your changes are saved on the server.

If co-authoring in Word for the web isn’t working

If co-authoring isn’t working in Word for the web, it might be because someone has the document open in a version of Word that doesn’t support co-authoring. The document might contain features that are not supported for editing in Word for the web, or some other problem. For help, see Troubleshoot co-authoring Word documents.

Note: In SharePoint 2010, Word for the web does not support co-authoring, but you can work together in Word 2010, Word 2013, and Microsoft Word for Mac 2011.

Professional slang is the weird and wonderful array of terms, acronyms and insults that crop up in a variety of professions.

It has some overlap with jargon, but while jargon can be used to intimidate the ignorant or just to shorten a complex explanation (“I got a 404, did a hard refresh and now the CSS isn’t loading” is a quicker and more technical way to say “the website didn’t load, so I asked my browser to reload it from scratch and now the style and layout of the page is messed up”), professional slang is often less efficient than the terms it might have replaced. It’s a means of signalling that you are part of a professional group and you know what you’re talking about. It’s a means of disguising what you mean from your clients or less clued-in colleagues. And it’s frequently very funny.
We’ve taken a look at some English-language slang from a variety of professions to see how it reveals the concerns, priorities and linguistic impulses of those particular professions. Here are 30 of our favourite examples of professional slang:

Doctors’ slang

Much of doctors’ slang serves a very particular need: the need to jot things down on a patient’s notes that explained the patient’s situation, but in a way that the patient themselves would not be able to understand. As such, it’s often quite insulting, and usually involves some quite dark humour.
This kind of doctors’ slang is now in decline, as records are increasingly computerised and made available to patients who want to know what these odd abbreviations mean. However, the other variety of doctors’ slang – mocking nicknames for different departments and specialities – is still going strong.
1. CTD – Circling the Drain: A typically dark example of medical humour, a patient who is ‘circling the drain’ is expected to pass away soon. Unsurprisingly, doctors have endless coded ways of referring to this, in order to make each other aware of the situation. Shortly afterwards, the note might be ‘C/C’ (cancel Christmas) or ‘ECU’ (eternal care unit – i.e. heaven).
2. TEETH – Tried Everything Else, Try Homeopathy: Medical doctors’ contempt for dubious alternative medicine shines through in this innocent-looking acronym, which similarly suggests that a patient doesn’t have much hope of recovery.
3. NFN – Normal for Norfolk: More biting humour here; Norfolk is typically the punchline of British jokes about people who are a bit odd, because of the area’s insular reputation.
4. ATS – Acute Thespian Syndrome: Many examples of doctors’ slang sound like they could be an actual condition – almost. ‘Thespian’ is a seldom-used English word for ‘actor’, so if someone in a doctor’s surgery or hospital has ‘acute thespian syndrome’, then they’re putting it on. Similarly, ‘acute pneumoencephalopathy’ sounds like a real condition, but in fact means ‘airheaded’.
5. Baby catcher: A ‘baby catcher’ is a much less obscure term than the previous four – it means obstetrician. Similarly, the ‘Freud squad’ refers to psychiatrists, ‘slashers’ to surgeons and ‘gassers’ to anaesthetists.

Computer technicians’ slang

The world of slang used by computer technicians, programmers and other parts of the computer geek world sometimes has the same root as medical slang: the need to explain a circumstance to others without your patient/client understanding you. However, slang in these professions is more often based around making what can be a frustrating job a little bit more entertaining.
So much of what was once geek slang has now entered mainstream usage (most people are now familiar with the concept of a ‘gif’, even if we can’t agree on how to pronounce it) that profession-specific slang is harder to find. Additionally, in such a fast-moving field, many terms are now obsolete – the idea of being ‘stuck in blue bar land’, where a loading screen takes forever, is thankfully a much less common experience than it once was. All the same, we’ve found these five examples of what the people who fix your laptop or make that app work are saying behind closed doors.
6. PEBCAK – Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard: This has a variety of alternatives, such as ‘PICNIC’ – problem in chair, not in computer. This is used when the technician realises that the reason you can’t get your computer to work does not lie in a fault with the computer.
7. Smug Report: Punning on ‘bug report’, this is a form of bug report – i.e. a user submitting a fault they’ve found with a program or system – that has been submitted by a user with an overinflated idea of their own expertise, complete with suggestions of solutions that serve only to emphasise the depths of the user’s ignorance.
8. Fermat’s Last Post: Fermat’s Last Theorem is a famous theorem conjectured by by Pierre Fermat in 1637 in the margin of a book, with a note saying he had a proof that would not fit in the margin. It took until 1995 for anyone else to come up with a proof. Fermat’s Last Post plays on this idea – it’s a post to a forum in which the author claims to have found a straightforward way of fixing a bug, but doesn’t say what it is and never returns to explain.
9. Copy, paste and pray: Sometimes a programmer has no solution but to copy some code from someone’s suggestion on the internet, and hope ardently that it works.
10. Guiltware: Chances are, you’ve encountered this yourself. Some software is free. Some software is free but comes with a catch: it will make you feel guilt until you’ve made a donation to support its development, or registered, or something similar. That’s guiltware.

Photographers’ slang

The chief problem of professional photographers – if their slang is anything to go by – is the belief of amateurs that they can do just as good a job. Mocking the practices of amateur photographer ranges from gentle nicknames to obvious insults, due to the irritation at the lack of respect for professional expertise.
The other enduring theme of photographers’ slang is language that reflects the significant changes that the advent of cheap digital photography has wrought upon the field. Older analogue cameras get affectionate nicknames, and the practices that digital photography encourages are lampooned.
11. ATGNI – All The Gear, No Idea: In photography as in so many other fields, there are people under the impression that buying all the latest and most expensive equipment will lend them immediate expertise. Sadly, it won’t.
12. Uncle Bob: Specific to wedding photographers, an ‘Uncle Bob’ is the guest who comes with his (or her?) own very fancy camera, gets in the way, lectures to the photographer how things should be done and is generally the more irritating version of someone who has ‘ATGNI’.
13. Bottletop: Photographers aren’t exclusively damning towards those who have more money than sense. A ‘bottletop’ is the evocative term for a cheap, low-quality lens.
14. Spray and pray: This is what ‘Uncle Bob’ does – snapping away in the hope of taking a decent photo by chance rather than by skill. Unfortunately, just as no monkeys have yet written the complete works of Shakespeare, this is less effective than ‘Uncle Bob’ might assume.
15. Chimping: When you stand around looking at the display after taking a photo – like a bunch of monkeys pawing over some food – that’s ‘chimping’.

Military slang

Military slang shows a fascinating evolution over the past century or so. Different locations of combat are reflected in the vocabulary that soldiers pick up, from British soldiers at the time of the British Raj referring to a ‘desk wallah’ (where ‘wallah’ is a Marathi and Hindustani suffix indicating a worker of some kind – in this case, one who sits around behind their desk instead of getting out and about with the troops) to US soldiers whose slang includes fragments of Vietnamese and Arabic.
Inevitably, most military slang reflects the harsh environment in which it developed; we’ve chosen some of the tamer options here.
16. Blue on blue contact: This scarcely counts as slang, being used in official documentation, but is an interesting example of a euphemism for a euphemism. Blue on blue contact is a nicer way of saying friendly fire – or to put it bluntly, shooting at your own side.
17. Top brass: This is an instance of military slang that has slipped into common usage. ‘Brass’ refers to officers, thanks to all the shiny brass buttons on their uniforms; ‘top brass’ is the peak of that hierarchy.
18. Penguin: a cute term used by RAF aircrews for ground crew; the people who are all flap and no fly.
19. Pilot before Pontius: Another one from the RAF, this refers to Pontius Pilate; if you were ‘a pilot before Pontius’ then you must have been doing this for a very long time indeed!
20. Rubber dagger: This is the nickname for the Royal Marines Reserve in the UK, and seems quite affectionate (they are the people who are trained in the UK, ready in case they are needed, but who mostly do normal jobs and are not called upon to fight – hence that their daggers are only rubber) – although one forum poster says, quite sniffily, “I personally find this offensive!” Given the demanding physical standards required of Royal Marines Reservists, perhaps it’s best not to offend them…

Police slang

Searching for ‘police slang’ inevitably brings up quite a lot of criminal slang for the police; much of it not particularly friendly. But here we’ve looked at slang used by the police themselves. Puns are popular, and some of the more obscure terms have overlaps with cockney rhyming slang – unsurprising given the size and influence of the Metropolitan Police in London.
You might expect police slang to reveal disdain for criminals, but actually this makes up a very small part of the overall range of slang used. Instead, police officers have a remarkable number of terms to mock their workshy colleagues.
21. Blues and Twos: A term in use among the general public as well, this refers to the two-tone siren and flashing blue lights of a police car. A greater variety of sirens are now in use; police slang is often quite slow to change, with forms and procedures retaining nicknames that made sense decades ago.
22. Olympic torch: Just as the Olympic torch never goes out, this term refers to an officer who never leaves the station.
23. Station Cat: Similarly, the ‘Station Cat’ is the officer who wanders around preening themselves like an arrogant tomcat, finding any excuse possible to avoid work.
24. K9: An official name that must have been dreamt up by someone with too little to do that day, a K9 unit – say it out loud – is a dog unit.
25. Giving his drum a spin: This refers to searching a suspect’s house. What’s particularly interesting is that the term ‘drum’ for ‘house’ has been suggested as Cockney Rhyming Slang – ‘drum and bass’ = place – except that this term predates drum and bass as a genre. The idea of giving it a ‘spin’ suggests the drum of a washing machine rather than the musical variety, which in its own right is a surprisingly domestic metaphor.

Restaurant slang

While doctors and the police are increasingly having to avoid slang, for fear of it being recorded digitally and needing to explain their comments in court, one field where slang is alive and well is the restaurant industry.
Restaurant slang is informed by the need to convey ideas quickly – e.g. explaining to someone, rapidly, that they need to stay put or they will have boiling water spilled all over them – as well as the fact that the industry is more multilingual than most, so non-standard English tends to thrive. Particularly in the US restaurant industry, a lot of slang is a reflection of the fusion of Spanish and English that is used in kitchens. The high-pressure environment of professional catering also comes through, as well as the disdain in which diners are held by chefs when their order reflects poor taste.
26. Dying on the pass: The ‘pass’ is the area where hot food is placed to stay warm before the waiting staff come to pick it up – and if the food there is ‘dying’, then it needs to be collected as soon as possible, because it’s in the process of becoming inedible.
27. Cremated: How chefs refer to steaks and burgers that they consider overcooked. An order for a steak to be ‘well done’ is usually translated by chefs as ‘cremated’.
28. Still mooing: The opposite of ‘cremated’, which is likely to garner more respect from the chef.
29. In the weeds: This is what some restaurant employees will suggest is the perennial state of affairs: when there are too many demanding customers, too many orders and too little time to serve everyone in.
30. Dine and dash: Another one that’s seeped into general usage, to ‘dine and dash’ is not hurrying to get to the theatre in time after your meal; it’s eating and then running off without paying the bill.

Do you have any more great examples of professional slang? Share them in the comments!

Image credits: banner; doctor; computer; photographer; military; police; restaurant.