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25-letter words containing a, d, n, t

  • dataphone digital service — (communications, product)   (DDS) The first private-line digital service offered by AT&T, with data rates typically at 2.4, 4.8, 9.6 and 56 kilobits per second. DDS is now part of AT&T's Accunet family of services. Most LEC (local exchange carriers) and IXC (IntereXchange Carriers) offer similar services.
  • decision support database — A database from which data is extracted and analysed statistically (but not modified) in order to inform business or other decisions. This is in contrast to an operational database which is being continuously updated. For example, a decision support database might provide data to determine the average salary of different types of workers, whereas an operational database containing the same data would be used to calculate pay check amounts. Often, decision support data is extracted from operation databases.
  • declaration of bankruptcy — a formal statement made by a company or individual to announce that they are bankrupt
  • declaration of indulgence — a royal grant during the reigns of Charles II and James II of England giving Nonconformists and Roman Catholics a measure of religious freedom
  • decreasing term insurance — Decreasing term insurance is life insurance with the amount of coverage decreasing over the term of the policy and a lump sum payment if you die in advance.
  • defense trade regulations — (legal)   The U.S. law governening munitions export and defense technology (F-16s, TOW missiles and cryptology). According to the U.S. (and Canada) cryptography is a munition and people who export it can be charged as though they were exporting bombs or state secrets. People have been. See also EFF.
  • defined contribution plan — A defined contribution plan is a type of pension plan that specifies the annual contribution that the employer will pay on behalf of each plan participant.
  • definite relative pronoun — a relative pronoun that refers to an antecedent, as who in It was I who told you.
  • dell computer corporation — (company)   One of the biggest US manufacturers of IBM PC compatibles. "From notebooks to networks", their slogan says.
  • democratic unionist party — a Northern Irish political party, founded by Ian Paisley in 1971, advocating the maintenance of union with the UK
  • department of agriculture — the department of the U.S. federal government that institutes and administers all federal programs dealing with agriculture. Abbreviation: USDA.
  • develop-mentally disabled — a disability, as mental retardation or cerebral palsy, that begins at an early age and continues indefinitely, leading to substantial handicap.
  • device independent bitmap — (graphics, file format)   (DIB) An image format in which the sequence and depth of pixels in the file is not specifically related to their layout in any particular device. This allows any device dependent bitmap (DDB) image to be converted to or DIB format without loss of information, and this can then later be converted to other DDB formats for, e.g., printing or display. Rather than requiring converters from each DDB format to all other formats, only converters to and from DIB are needed. DIB images are normally transferred in metafiles, bmp files, and the clipboard. Transferring colour bitmaps from one device to another was not possible in versions of Microsoft Windows earlier than 3.0. Application programs can build DIB images without any interaction with Windows. If Windows lacks a drawing primitive, the application can simulate it directly into the DIB instead of using the existing graphics device interface (GDI) primitives. Unfortunately, under Windows versions 3.0 and 3.1, GDI cannot perform output operations directly to a DIB. Conversion between DIB and DDB is performed by the device driver. Where the driver does not have this facility, the conversion is performed by GDI but only in monochrome. DIBs are slower to use than device dependent bitmaps due to the conversions required.
  • díaz del castillo, bernal — (bɛʀˈnɑl) ; bernälˈ) 1492?-1581?; Sp. historian & soldier with Cortés
  • diesel-electric generator — A diesel-electric generator is a piece of equipment that uses diesel as a fuel to produce electricity.
  • digital rights management — (legal)   (DRM) Any technology used to limit the use of software, music, movies or other digital data. This generally relies on some interaction between the media and the system that plays it. For example, video DVDs usually include a region code. If this does not match the player's region code, the player will refuse to play the disc.
  • digital signal processing — (DSP) Computer manipulation of analog signals (commonly sound or image) which have been converted to digital form (sampled).
  • discrete cosine transform — (mathematics)   (DCT) A technique for expressing a waveform as a weighted sum of cosines. The DCT is central to many kinds of signal processing, especially video compression. Given data A(i), where i is an integer in the range 0 to N-1, the forward DCT (which would be used e.g. by an encoder) is: B(k) = sum A(i) cos((pi k/N) (2 i + 1)/2) i=0 to N-1 B(k) is defined for all values of the frequency-space variable k, but we only care about integer k in the range 0 to N-1. The inverse DCT (which would be used e.g. by a decoder) is: AA(i)= sum B(k) (2-delta(k-0)) cos((pi k/N)(2 i + 1)/2) k=0 to N-1 where delta(k) is the Kronecker delta. The main difference between this and a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is that the DFT traditionally assumes that the data A(i) is periodically continued with a period of N, whereas the DCT assumes that the data is continued with its mirror image, then periodically continued with a period of 2N. Mathematically, this transform pair is exact, i.e. AA(i) == A(i), resulting in lossless coding; only when some of the coefficients are approximated does compression occur. There exist fast DCT algorithms in analogy to the Fast Fourier Transform.
  • do-it-yourself enthusiast — an enthusiast of the hobby or process of constructing and repairing things by yourself
  • document image processing — (DIP) Storage, management and retrieval of images.
  • domain architecture model — (systems analysis)   A set of software architectures generic to a domain that define organising frameworks for constructing new application designs and implementations within the domain, consistent with the domain requirements model.
  • don't give up the day job — If someone tells you not to give up the day job, they are saying that they think you should continue doing what you are good at, rather than trying something new which they think you will fail at.
  • dopamine receptor agonist — A dopamine receptor agonist is any compound that activates dopamine receptors when dopamine is not present.
  • double taxation agreement — an agreement between two countries that lessens the tax burden on citizens of each country living in the other
  • double wingback formation — an offensive formation in which two backs line up at opposite ends of the backfield about one yard outside of the ends and about one yard behind the line of scrimmage.
  • drive someone up the wall — If you say that something or someone is driving you up the wall, you are emphasizing that they annoy and irritate you.
  • dual tone multi frequency — (communications)   (DTMF, or "touch-tone") A method used by the telephone system to communicate the keys pressed when dialling. Pressing a key on the phone's keypad generates two simultaneous tones, one for the row and one for the column. These are decoded by the exchange to determine which key was pressed.
  • eastern aden protectorate — a former British protectorate, now the E part of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen: composed of the Arab sheikdoms of Hadhramaut and the island of Socotra.
  • edward trowbridge collins — Edward Trowbridge ("Eddie") 1887–1951, U.S. baseball player.
  • electromagnetic radiation — radiation consisting of self-sustaining oscillating electric and magnetic fields at right angles to each other and to the direction of propagation. It does not require a supporting medium and travels through empty space at the speed of light
  • electronic funds transfer — (application, communications)   (EFT, EFTS, - system) Transfer of money initiated through electronic terminal, automated teller machine, computer, telephone, or magnetic tape. In the late 1990s, this increasingly includes transfer initiated via the web. The term also applies to credit card and automated bill payments.
  • enhanced graphics adapter — (graphics, hardware)   (EGA) An IBM PC display standard with a resolution of 640 x 350 pixels of 16 colours.
  • entity-relationship model — (database, specification)   An approach to data modelling proposed by P. Chen in 1976. The model says that you divide your database in two logical parts, entities (e.g. "customer", "product") and relations ("buys", "pays for"). One of the first activities in specifying an application is defining the entities involved and their relationships, e.g. using an entity-relationship diagram to represent a model.
  • examination for discovery — a pretrial meeting to disclose evidence that will be presented later
  • expanding universe theory — the theory, developed from the observed red shifts of celestial bodies, that the space between galaxies is expanding, so that they appear to recede from us at velocities that increase with their distance
  • exploratory data analysis — (EDA)
  • extended backus-naur form — (language)   Any variation on the basic Backus-Naur Form (BNF) meta-syntax notation with (some of) the following additional constructs: square brackets "[..]" surrounding optional items, suffix "*" for Kleene closure (a sequence of zero or more of an item), suffix "+" for one or more of an item, curly brackets enclosing a list of alternatives, and super/subscripts indicating between n and m occurrences. All these constructs can be expressed in plain BNF using extra productions and have been added for readability and succinctness.
  • extended fortran language — (EFL) A Fortran preprocessor to provide structured programming constructs much like C. EFL is a descendant of RATFOR. It is written in C.
  • first and second manassas — two battles fought at Manassas Junction near a stream named Bull Run, during the American Civil War (July, 1861 and August, 1862), in both of which the Federal army was routed by the Confederates
  • flexible spending account — an account to which an employee contributes a portion of earnings to pay for certain expenses such as medical and dependent care: contributions are exempt from payroll taxes. Abbreviation: FSA.
  • franked investment income — (formerly) dividends from one UK company received by another on which the paying company had paid corporation tax so that the receiving company had no corporation tax to pay: discontinued from 1999
  • frequently asked question — (convention)   (FAQ, or rarely FAQL, FAQ list) A document provided for many Usenet newsgroups (and, more recently, web services) which attempts to answer questions which new readers often ask. These are maintained by volunteers and posted regularly to the newsgroup. You should always consult the FAQ list for a group before posting to it in case your question or point is common knowledge. The collection of all FAQ lists is one of the most precious and remarkable resources on the Internet. It contains a huge wealth of up-to-date expert knowledge on many subjects of common interest. Accuracy of the information is greatly assisted by its frequent exposure to criticism by an interested, and occasionally well-informed, audience (the readers of the relevant newsgroup). The main FTP archive for FAQs is on a computer called RTFM at MIT, where they can be accessed either by group or by hierarchy. There is another archive at Imperial College, London, UK and a web archive in Ohio, USA. The FAQs are also posted to Usenet newsgroups: news:comp.answers, news:news.answers and news:alt.answers.
  • fully lazy lambda lifting — John Hughes's optimisation of lambda lifting to give full laziness. Maximal free expressions are shared to minimise the amount of recalculation. Each inner sub-expression is replaced by a function of its maximal free expressions (expressions not containing any bound variable) applied to those expressions. E.g. f = \ x . (\ y . (+) (sqrt x) y) ((+) (sqrt x)) is a maximal free expression in (\ y . (+) (sqrt x) y) so this inner abstraction is replaced with (\ g . \ y . g y) ((+) (sqrt x)) Now, if a partial application of f is shared, the result of evaluating (sqrt x) will also be shared rather than re-evaluated on each application of f. As Chin notes, the same benefit could be achieved without introducing the new higher-order function, g, if we just extracted out (sqrt x). This is similar to the code motion optimisation in procedural languages where constant expressions are moved outside a loop or procedure.
  • further education college — (in Britain) an establishment that offers formal education beyond school and which is not a university or polytechnic
  • gabriel daniel fahrenheit — Gabriel Daniel [German gah-bree-el dah-nee-el] /German ˈgɑ briˌɛl ˈdɑ niˌɛl/ (Show IPA), 1686–1736, German physicist: devised a temperature scale and introduced the use of mercury in thermometers.
  • gas desulfurization plant — A gas desulfurization plant is a place with equipment that removes sulfur dioxide from flue gas before it is released into the atmosphere.
  • genetically modified food — a food that contains ingredients made from genetically modified plants or animals
  • gensym standard interface — (programming)   (GSI) A set of C libraries and programming tools used to interface G2 to external systems. Commercially available bridges are available to SCADA systems and PLCs.
  • german wirehaired pointer — one of a German breed of large sporting dogs having a harsh, wiry, flat-lying coat usually liver and white in color, a muzzle with a beard and whiskers, and a docked tail, used as a retrieving pointer.
  • give someone the dingbats — to make someone nervous
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