The phrase "a sort of engine" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when describing something that functions similarly to an engine but may not be a traditional engine.
Example: "The new device operates like a sort of engine, converting energy into motion in a unique way."
Alternatives: "a type of engine" or "a kind of engine".
Above the last ladder, there was a trapdoor, which led to a sort of engine room.
"If you sit at home, you get anxious, but that anxiety is a sort of engine for you.
Quaffing cocktails on Melrose Avenue is worlds away from Gütersloh, where Arvato functions as a sort of engine room for Bertelsmann's more glamorous businesses.
White water rafting requires every paddler in the raft to use their strength as a sort of engine for the boat, while your guide steers you through rapids.
"Blood is only water carrying a particular charge of deluded affinity," John writes of family connections and, indeed, he can often seem callous with regard to his own: he lacks much empathy with or sympathy for his mother, even during her painful revelations of illegitimacy; his father, he notes, is "less a person in any conventional sense than a sort of thwarting engine".
Mr Wales called him up to contest every single point, and when the two met offline to carry on the jousting, they hit it off famously and became friends.By the late 1990s, Mr Wales was investing in a website called Bomis, a sort of search engine or web directory where "99% of the searches had to do with naked babes," as Mr Foote, who was Bomis's advertising director, puts it.
The CSR Manager, introduced since 2010, represents a "corporate presidium" of sustainability, a sort of "relational engine" for the stakeholders engagement and dialogue, who collaborates and interacts on a daily basis with the President and other offices.
But the main reason we're super excited about SOPA, is that your best and brightest entrepreneurs and developers – realising that your version of the Internet is now a sort of steam engine driven version controlled by Congress and unaccountable Corporations (steampunk!) – will now move to Europe to create their next global ("minus USA", LOL!) Internet company.
These can work as a sort of in-engine brake system when you need to save your actual brakes.
It's a very different kind of book than my others – there's a different sort of engine under the hood, with more moving pieces.
The gist is to build a sort of "life search" engine that helps mobile workers find the best quality of life based on their pay and interests.
