A Dictionary of Civil, Water Resources & Environmental Engineering Review

A Dictionary of Civil, Water Resources & Environmental Engineering was released in January 2013 and I recommend all PE exam takers get it!

There WILL be around 5 questions on your exam that are absolute freebies, as long as you understand the jargon they are using. It is next to impossible to prepare for every engineering word they could potentially throw at you, so you NEED to bring some dictionary resources.

I wish I had brought an engineering dictionary with me to the exam, but did not think to and did not know that any existed. A Dictionary of Civil, Water Resources & Environmental Engineering  is a perfect fit for most people taking the test.

The title infers that it covers general civil, with some emphasis on water and environmental. This is mostly true, and probably for the better as water and environmental tend to have more conceptual problems that are easy to solve as long as you can understand the jargon that they use.  It will without a doubt be helpful in the morning session, and will likely provide some insight in your depth session as well.

I took the Geotechnical afternoon component and would have benefited from confirming some of the words that appear in the questions, such as: varve, lacustrine, and piezometric.

You may argue that the CERM contains a dictionary in the back. That is true, it does! But the definitions in the CERM are not as straightforward as these, and it can be unwieldy to navigate to the glossary of the CERM in the middle of the test due to its size.  The dictionary has a larger number of terms, and has very straight to the point definitions whereas some of the CERM definitions are cryptic.

Do yourself a favor and get it!