I'm not sure quite how you got "tertiary", but, I mean, to some degree I agree with you. The qualities I pointed out are certainly not sufficient qualities for

I'm not sure quite how you got "tertiary", but, I mean, to some degree I agree with you. The qualities I pointed out are certainly not sufficient qualities for something to be engineering, and if I had to say which was more important, the design-and-craft or the responsibility, I'd say it was the design-and-craft. But many things fit that Merriam's definition, and are not engineering. Since you were so honest as to note that dictionaries aren't perfect, I don't want to be a jerk about how useless that definition is, but since you went on to say that software seems to fit, let's just look at some examples of just how excessively inclusive that definition is. (I'll assume that 2a means "matter and/or energy", because if it means "matter and also energy" then clearly software doesn't qualify anyway.) Knitting fits those definitions perfectly. Science, yes, mathematics, yes, properties of matter, yes, useful to people, yes, design and manufacture of complex products, yes. Are you claiming that knitting is engineering? Filmmaking manipulates matter and energy, creates a thing that is useful to people, and involves complex design and complex manufacture. Music composition depends on math and science, manipulates sources of energy in nature, is useful to people, and involves the design of products (although composition doesn't involve the manufacture of those products; we call that manufacture "performance"). Accounting doesn't worry about "properties of matter and energy" (much as software doesn't, as you point out), but it involves the application of mathematics to create things useful to people, and there's often the design and manufacture of complex (informational) products. (Note that I'm not saying that clerical work fits the definition, I'm saying that the design of accounting processes fits the definition. Obviously many "accountants" are not designing processes but are simply doing bookkeeping, in the same way that a rivetter is not an engineer.) Compared to any of these, software creation involves no science, typically little mathematics (although there are certainly very deep exceptions to that, haha), and doesn't involve any manufacture. If you're gonna put software creation in the club, you're basically saying that "engineering is creation stuff (including non-physical stuff"). No one agrees with that concept. --- That has all been arguably a bit of an over-reaction to the details of your argument, so I want to just return here to my core point. Yes, certification and sign-off and ethics and liability and law and culture is arguably a less-essential characteristic of engineering than something to do with making stuff. But in this day and age, the certification and ethics and sign-off and so on is a necessary part of what makes it engineering. And it's one of the main reasons that software engineering as practices isn't real engineering. Yet.