Talk:SAE

Standard American Equivalent
I cant find any evidence of "Standard American Equivalent" being a common term for Imperial sizes. It was added here back in Sept 2006 I have a few AmPro tools with "SAE" on the cases; my guess is that it refers to Society of Automotive Engineers, which defines standards that use Imperial. John Vandenberg 11:13, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
 * SAE being Standard American Equivalent is listed by some websites of acronyms, but I can't find an official source of it. Society of Automotive Engineers seems rather unlikely since they officially only support SI (metric) units (and there are sources for that, going back to 1969). I think it should be re-introduced. Nerfer (talk) 00:05, 29 December 2012 (UTC)


 * The Society of Automotive Engineers is indeed where the "SAE" abbreviation came from, although many people have turned the usage of the name, when referring to tools with phrases such as "available in both metric and SAE sizes", into something it never officially meant. It's been treated for decades by some users (including some manufacturers and distributors of hardware and tools) as a shorthand way to mean inch-based as opposed to metric—but it was never used that way by SAE itself. This confused usage probably started because there was a time, back before the Unified Thread Standard was convened (1948/49), when the United States Standard thread (USS) (which was inch-based) was augmented by a standard developed by SAE to cover various sizes that the USS didn't cover. So back then you could refer to "SAE threads" or "SAE screw sizes" and be referring to that particular inch-based series, and you could also hold that in contradistinction to metric thread sizes. But that usage was kind of sloppy, and it's kind of dumb today to still make a contradistinction of SAE-vs-metric when what you really mean is UTS-vs-ISO, but people do it because it's a convenient/recognized shorthand and also out of ignorance (sometimes the former, sometimes the latter). The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) began in the U.S. (it's now long since global) and was creating standards for fasteners as far back as the 1910s (see this example from 1919). They still issue a huge variety of standards (for fasteners, materials, processes, quality management systems, and more) which make use liberally of both SI and non-SI units, reflecting the fact that manufacturing industries still use both. (For example, if you read current SAE AMS specs, you find both systems of measurement used frequently). I am very confident (although at the moment I have no sources to cite to prove it) that "Standard American Equivalent" is a backronymic expansion that someone guessed long ago and it has been repeated across the internet by many others who assumed it was "official" because it sounds plausible. You can also find lots of google hits for people who mistakenly expand "SAE" as "Society of *American Engineers" (wrong but sounds plausible). — ¾-10 21:44, 29 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Good info, thanks. Nerfer (talk) 04:02, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Standard Ethernet Adapter
Unless I'm missing something, this acronym would be SEA, not SAE, wouldn't it? [James] 19 May 2012 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.49.207.189 (talk) 19:25, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

SAE in medicine
SAE means also serious adverse event — Preceding unsigned comment added by Farfadette (talk • contribs) 07:47, 9 August 2012 (UTC)