- Sinking
- General term for the construction of vertical shafts or boreholes.
- Drifting
- General term for the construction of a pit or tunnel.
- Support
- Support within a mine or tunnel.
- Fracture
- Collapse of part of a mine.
- Ventilation
- Ventilation and ventilation.
- Cut-through
- Removal of the last material still separating two tunnel tubes to be connected.
- Erbstollen
- Adit for water solution or ventilation.
- Erratic block
- Geological obstacle (usually a single large stone in sandy or clayey soils).
- Mine rescue team
- Rescue force for use in mining, analogous to the fire department; consists of volunteer, specially qualified miners.
- Cat
- Motorized transport system suspended from the ceiling.
- Mine surveyor
- Underground surveyor.
- Thickness
- The thickness of a rock layer.
- Coffin lid
- A stone detaching from the ceiling without warning.
- Face
- Tunnel cross-sectional area at which the tunnel is driven forward.
- Blind hole
- A tunnel that ends as a “dead end” in the ground.
- Invert
- Lower boundary surface of a mine workings.
- Strosse
- The volume of rock below, which in the New Austrian Tunnelling method is often excavated after the upper material has been removed.
- Segments
- Segments of cast iron, steel or concrete used for the watertight lining of shafts.
- underground
- Everything in the “hole”, be it tunnels, drifts, shafts or tunnels.
- Weather
- Totality of all gases in the mine
