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19-letter words containing a, b, d, s

  • disablement benefit — (in Britain) a noncontributory benefit payable to a person disabled through injury or disease caused by their work
  • disambiguation page — a page on a website that lists various websites or web pages that have or could have the same title. The user is able to select from the list that page, site etc that he or she actually wants
  • distinguishableness — The state or quality of being distinguishable.
  • dobsonian telescope — a relatively inexpensive Newtonian telescope, suitable for visual but not photographic use, in which the tube assembly slips freely in the lower base.
  • dry-bulk cargo ship — a ship that carries an unpackaged dry cargo such as coal or grain; bulk carrier
  • dutchman's-breeches — a plant, Dicentra cucullaria, of the fumitory family, having long clusters of pale-yellow, two-spurred flowers.
  • east dunbartonshire — a council area of central Scotland to the N of Glasgow: part of Strathclyde region from 1975 until 1996: mainly agricultural and residential. Administrative centre: Kirkintilloch. Pop: 106 970 (2003 est). Area: 172 sq km (66 sq miles)
  • ebola virus disease — Also called Ebola fever, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, Ebola virus disease. a usually fatal disease, a type of hemorrhagic fever, caused by the Ebola virus and marked by high fever, severe gastrointestinal distress, and bleeding.
  • error-based testing — (programming)   Testing where information about programming style, error-prone language constructs, and other programming knowledge is applied to select test data capable of detecting faults, either a specified class of faults or all possible faults.
  • extensible database — (database)   A DBMS that allows access to data from remote sources as if the remote data were part of the database.
  • fall by the wayside — to cease or fail to continue doing something
  • fault-based testing — (testing)   Software testing using test data designed to demonstrate the absence of a set of pre-specified faults; typically, frequently occurring faults. For example, to demonstrate that the software handles or avoids divide by zero correctly, the test data would include zero.
  • financial ombudsman — any of five British ombudsmen: the Banking Ombudsman, set up in 1986 to investigate complaints from bank customers; the Building Society Ombudsman, set up in 1987 to investigate complaints from building society customers; the Insurance Ombudsman, set up in 1981 to investigate complaints by policyholders (since 1988 this ombudsman has also operated a Unit Trust Ombudsman scheme); the Investment Ombudsman set up in 1989 to investigate complaints by investors (the Personal Investment Authority Ombudsman is responsible for investigating complaints by personal investors); and the Pensions Ombudsman, set up in 1993 to investigate complaints regarding pension schemes
  • foundation subjects — the subjects studied as part of the National Curriculum, including the compulsory core subjects
  • functional database — (database, language)   A database which uses a functional language as its query language. Databases would seem to be an inappropriate application for functional languages since, a purely functional language would have to return a new copy of the entire database every time (part of) it was updated. To be practically scalable, the update mechanism must clearly be destructive rather than functional; however it is quite feasible for the query language to be purely functional so long as the database is considered as an argument. One approach to the update problem would use a monad to encapsulate database access and ensure it was single threaded. Alternative approaches have been suggested by Trinder, who suggests non-destructive updating with shared data structures, and Sutton who uses a variant of a Phil Wadler's linear type system. There are two main classes of functional database languages. The first is based upon Backus' FP language, of which FQL is probably the best known example. Adaplan is a more recent language which falls into this category. More recently, people have been working on languages which are syntactically very similar to modern functional programming languages, but which also provide all of the features of a database language, e.g. bulk data structures which can be incrementally updated, type systems which can be incrementally updated, and all data persisting in a database. Examples are PFL [Poulovassilis&Small, VLDB-91], and Machiavelli [Ohori et al, ACM SIGMOD Conference, 1998].
  • gigabits per second — (unit)   (Gbps) A unit of information transfer rate equal to one billion bits per second. Note that, while a gigabit is defined as a power of two (2^30 bits), a gigabit per second is defined as a power of ten (10^9 bits per second, which is slightly less) than 2^30).
  • giraldus cambrensis — literary name of Gerald de Barri. ?1146–?1223, Welsh chronicler and churchman, noted for his accounts of his travels in Ireland and Wales
  • goodwill ambassador — an ambassador who shows goodwill to another country, organization, etc, on behalf of his or her own country, organization, etc
  • great crested grebe — a large Old World grebe, Podiceps cristatus, having black, earlike tufts of feathers projecting backward from the top of the head.
  • handlebar moustache — a man's moustache having long, curved ends that resemble the handlebars of a bicycle.
  • have one's blood up — to be or cause to be angry or inflamed
  • honorable discharge — a discharge from military service of a person who has fulfilled obligations efficiently, honorably, and faithfully.
  • hydrostatic balance — a balance for finding the weight of an object submerged in water in order to determine the upthrust on it and thus determine its relative density
  • in the catbird seat — If you say that someone is in the catbird seat, you think that their situation is very good.
  • industrial tribunal — (in Northern Ireland and formerly elsewhere in the UK) a tribunal that rules on disputes between employers and employees regarding unfair dismissal, redundancy, etc
  • installed user base — user base
  • intervertebral disc — any of the cartilaginous discs between individual vertebrae, acting as shock absorbers
  • intervertebral disk — the plate of fibrocartilage between the bodies of adjacent vertebrae.
  • keyboard instrument — any musical instrument that is played using a keyboard
  • knock someone bandy — to amaze or astound
  • label switched path — (networking)   (LSP) The specific path through a network that a datagram follows, based on its MPLS labels.
  • lean over backwards — to make a special effort, esp in order to please
  • learning disability — a disorder, as dyslexia, usually affecting school-age children of normal or above-normal intelligence, characterized by difficulty in understanding or using spoken or written language, and thought to be related to impairment or slowed development of perceptual motor skills.
  • look sb up and down — If someone looks you up and down, they direct their eyes from your head to your feet, in a rude and superior way and often as though they disapprove of you.
  • megabits per second — (unit)   (Mbps, Mb/s) Millions of bits per second. A unit of data rate. 1 Mb/s = 1,000,000 bits per second (not 1,048,576). E.g. Ethernet can carry 10 Mbps.
  • non-distinguishable — to mark off as different (often followed by from or by): He was distinguished from the other boys by his height.
  • normal distribution — a theoretical frequency distribution represented by a normal curve.
  • objectfuscated code — (humour, programming)   Object-oriented code which has been abstracted to so many levels that no-one can understand it anymore. A play on obfuscated code.
  • olive-backed thrush — Swainson's thrush.
  • optical double star — two stars that appear as one if not viewed through a telescope with adequate magnification, such as two stars that are separated by a great distance but are nearly in line with each other and an observer (optical double star) or those that are relatively close together and comprise a single physical system (physical double star)
  • over sb's dead body — You can say over my dead body to emphasize that you feel very strongly that something should not happen, and that you will do everything you can to prevent it.
  • own flesh and blood — If you say that someone is your own flesh and blood, you are emphasizing that they are a member of your family.
  • profitability study — a study of how much profit a company, organization, etc, makes or how profitable it is
  • pseudo-biographical — of or relating to a person's life: He's gathering biographical data for his book on Milton.
  • pseudorandom number — (programming)   One of a sequence of numbers generated by some algorithm so as to have an even distribution over some range of values and minimal correlation between successive values. Pseudorandom numbers are used in simulation and encryption. They are pseudorandom not random because the sequence eventually repeats exactly and is entirely determined by the initial conditions. One of the simplest algorithms is x[i+1] = (a * x[i] + c) mod m but this repeats after at most m numbers and successive numbers are closely related. Better algorithms generally use more previous numbers to calculate the next number.
  • redress the balance — to make a fair adjustment; see that justice is done
  • refreshable display — braille display
  • registered disabled — on a local authority register under the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970
  • relational database — an electronic database comprising multiple files of related information, usually stored in tables of rows (records) and columns (fields), and allowing a link to be established between separate files that have a matching field, as a column of invoice numbers, so that the two files can be queried simultaneously by the user.
  • removable hard disk — (storage)   A type of magnetic disk, or possibly magneto-optical disk which is not permanently attached to the disk drive (not a fixed disk) but which can be taken out and replaced, allowing many disks to be used in the same drive. The term "removable disk" would seem to be applicable to floppy disks but is generally reserved for hard disks in suitable cartridges such as those made by Syquest, Iomega and others. Removable disk packs were common on minicomputers such as the PDP-11 in use in the 1970s except that the drives were the size of washing machines and the disk packs as big as car wheels. Removable disks became popular on microcomputers in the 1990s as a cheap way of expanding disk space, transporting large amounts of data between computers and storing backups. Large, cheap fixed hard disks and USB memory sticks have made removable disks less attractive.
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