What do you call those two strands coming out of the electric capacitors?

Here is a picture of a capacitor:

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.