Software architecture is about the higher-level, big-picture stuff: https://stackoverflow.com/a/704909/623763

Architecting at least somewhat harkens to engineering; where there are costs, limits, tolerances, and to some degree aesthetics.

I'm pretty sure every engineering field calls it designing. Perhaps software devs feel a need to inflate what they actually do.

I think the analogy is to construction, not engineering.

In construction, architects and designers do different jobs. The software equivalents of those roles map reasonably well to the construction equivalents.

In my (software) experience, the terms are basically interchangeable. Some people will violently defend “architect right, design wrong” and others the opposite, So uh, pretty hard for me, a normal person, to care much about which word is right for the “you sit down and think before you build” part of software engineering.

In my country, we have both the academic title "engineer", and "engineer architect". People view this as "proper engineer" and "not so proper engineer".

Anyway, "you sit down and think before you build" is indeed what you want and the word for that is "strategy".

> the “you sit down and think before you build” part of software engineering.

Well, Agile, Scrum, and backlogs took care of that. /s

Design and architecture are 2 different things. Design is about appearance. Architecture is about structure.

Software design [0] isn’t about appearance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design