A turbine is a machine with a wheel of blades that spins when something pushes past it — water, steam, wind, or hot gas. The spinning is the whole point: that turning movement is then used to do work, most often to make electricity. Think of a pinwheel toy, but heavy, made of metal, and enormous. Nearly all the electricity you use at home was made by a turbine of some kind: steam from burning coal or from a nuclear reactor spins one, falling water in a dam spins one, wind spins one. Jet planes have them too — inside a jet engine, hot gas rushing out spins a turbine, which drives the fan at the front. So you will meet the word in compounds far more often than alone: 'wind turbine', 'steam turbine', 'gas turbine', 'turbine blade'. It is a normal technical word, not formal or fancy, and engineers say it every day. In everyday Taiwanese life the one you actually see is the wind turbine — those tall white three-blade towers along the west coast. Note the shape: a turbine takes energy OUT of a moving fluid. A fan or a propeller is the same idea running backwards — it uses energy to push air. People sometimes call a wind turbine a windmill, though actually a windmill was for grinding grain, not making power.