What do you call those two strands coming out of the electric capacitors?
Here is a picture of a capacitor:
What are these two metal wires called in the professional world in the US?
Solution 1:
The pieces of wire are called leads. I've never heard them referred to as "legs" except in casual conversation. For more information, Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_(electronics)
Solution 2:
Engineers typically use “leads”, pronounced like “bleeds”.
Solution 3:
Let me summarise the various answers here.
In engineering school and then later at a manufacturing plant, we called them leads.
Terminals are used when having to describe the leads in terms of electrical polarity +/-.
Legs are used by lay-people.
Solution 4:
Collectively, they're often figuratively referred to as legs - on a standard transistor, the three types are are called the Emitter, the Base, and the Collector, but that's probably more information than you needed.
Solution 5:
You can call them leads or pins.