What Is a Manifold?
It's funny, because in my much younger days I dropped out of college and worked as a mechanic for 3 years.  In the automotive world and internal combustion World, manifold has a much different meaning, though related.Basically, a manifold means something that takes the flow of gases from a one-to-many or a many-to-one.An intake manifold takes one single entry point for air feeding the engine and splits up into a separate input for each cylinder.An exhaust manifold takes the hot exhaust from each cylinder separately and combines them into one big pipe.