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19-letter words containing a, d, i, n, s

  • dig one's own grave — If you say that someone is digging their own grave, you are warning them that they are doing something foolish or dangerous that will cause their own failure.
  • digital electronics — (electronics)   The implementation of two-valued logic using electronic logic gates such as and gates, or gates and flip-flops. In such circuits the logical values true and false are represented by two different voltages, e.g. 0V for false and +5V for true. Similarly, numbers are normally represented in binary using two different voltages to represented zero and one. Digital electronics contrasts with analogue electronics which represents continuously varying quantities like sound pressure using continuously varying voltages. Digital electronics is the foundation of modern computers and digital communications. Massively complex digital logic circuits with millions of gates can now be built onto a single integrated circuit such as a microprocessor and these circuits can perform millions of operations per second.
  • dimethylnitrosamine — a yellow, water-soluble carcinogenic liquid, C 2 H 6 N 2 O, found in tobacco smoke and certain foods: known to be a potent carcinogen. Abbreviation: DMN, DMNA.
  • direct grant school — (in Britain, formerly) a school financed by endowment, fees, and a state grant conditional upon admittance of a percentage of nonpaying pupils nominated by the local education authority
  • disablement benefit — (in Britain) a noncontributory benefit payable to a person disabled through injury or disease caused by their work
  • disadvantageousness — The state or quality of being disadvantageous.
  • 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
  • disciplinary action — punishment or caution
  • discretionary trust — a trust in which the beneficiaries' shares are not fixed in the trust deed but are left to the discretion of other persons, often the trustees
  • discriminated union — (theory)   The discriminated union of two sets A and B is A + B = {(inA, a) | a in A} U {(inB, b)| b in B} where inA and inB are arbitrary tags which specify which summand an element originates from. A type (especially an algebraic data type) might be described as a discriminated union if it is a sum type whose objects consist of a tag to say which part of the union they belong to and a value of the corresponding type.
  • disenfranchisements — Plural form of disenfranchisement.
  • dispatch department — the department of an organization responsible for the dispatch of orders
  • dispersion relation — the relationship between the angular frequency (ω;) of a wave and the magnitude of its wave vector (k). Thus the wave's speed is ω/k
  • displacement engine — any engine employing the rectilinear motion of one or more pistons in cylinders.
  • display advertising — display ads taken collectively.
  • disseminated cancer — a cancerous tumour that has spread from the site of original growth to a secondary site
  • distance university — a degree-granting institution operating wholly or mainly by correspondence courses for students not resident on or within commuting distance of the campus.
  • distillation column — a type of still fitted with interior baffles, used for fractional distillation. Compare still2 (def 1).
  • distinctive feature — a feature of the sound system of a language that serves as the crucial distinguishing mark between two phonemes, as the distinctive feature of voicing, which distinguishes b from p in English, or nasality, which distinguishes m from b and p.
  • distinguishableness — The state or quality of being distinguishable.
  • diversified farming — the practice of producing a variety of crops or animals, or both, on one farm, as distinguished from specializing in a single commodity.
  • diversional therapy — the structured use of leisure time in recreation and play as a form of or supplement to conventional therapy
  • 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.
  • draw in one's horns — one of the bony, permanent, hollow paired growths, often curved and pointed, that project from the upper part of the head of certain ungulate mammals, as cattle, sheep, goats, or antelopes.
  • draw someone's fire — to attract the criticism or censure of someone
  • drill-down analysis — drill down
  • dynamic positioning — Dynamic positioning is the use of computers to control the position of a semi-submersible rig.
  • dynamic translation — (architecture)   A virtual machine implementation approach, used to speed up execution of byte-code programs. To execute a program unit such as a method or a function, the virtual machine compiles its bytecodes into (hardware) machine code. The translated code is also placed in a cache, so that next time that unit's machine code can be executed immediately, without repeating the translation. This technique was pioneered by the commercial Smalltalk implementation currently known as VisualWorks, in the early 1980s. Currently it is also used by some implementations of the Java Virtual Machine under the name JIT (Just In Time compilation).
  • dynatron oscillator — type of oscillator
  • 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)
  • educational adviser — a person who provides advice and training to teachers about teaching methods and educational policies
  • eilean donan castle — a castle near the Kyle of Lochalsh in Highland, Scotland: built in the 13th century; famous for its picturesque setting
  • elastic deformation — In elastic deformation a material changes shape when a stress is applied to it but goes back to its original state when the stress is removed.
  • end of transmission — (character)   (EOT) The mnemonic for ASCII character 4.
  • endowment insurance — Endowment insurance is a type of life insurance that pays a particular sum directly to the policyholder at a stated date, or to a beneficiary if the policyholder dies before this date.
  • 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.
  • fallacy of division — the fallacy of inferring that a property of the whole is also a property of parts or members of the whole (opposed to fallacy of composition).
  • fashion coordinator — a person in a department store or other establishment who coordinates activities centered upon or related to fashion, as fashion themes, shows, displays, and promotion.
  • 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.
  • feast of dedication — Hanukkah.
  • 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
  • finds its/their way — If something finds its way somewhere, it comes to that place, especially by chance.
  • first-sale doctrine — a legal principle allowing the purchaser of a lawfully made copy of a copyright-protected work to sell or give away that copy without permission but not to reproduce it.
  • fixed cost contract — a contract in which the costs do not vary
  • foundation subjects — the subjects studied as part of the National Curriculum, including the compulsory core subjects
  • francesca da rimini — Francesca da, Francesca da Rimini.
  • free alongside quay — (of a shipment of goods) delivered to the quay without charge to the buyer
  • free alongside ship — (of a shipment of goods) delivered to the dock without charge to the buyer, but excluding the cost of loading onto the vessel
  • 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].
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