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18-letter words containing a, e, g, n, i, s

  • countryside agency — (in England) a government agency that promotes the conservation and enjoyment of the countryside and aims to stimulate employment in rural areas
  • creeping featurism — (jargon)   /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ (Or "feature creep") A systematic tendency to load more chrome and features onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed. "The main problem with BSD Unix has always been creeping featurism." More generally, creeping featurism is the tendency for anything to become more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had this feature too". The result is usually a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone, and then another, and another, .... When creeping featurism gets out of hand, it's like a cancer. Usually this term is used to describe computer programs, but it could also be said of the federal government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A similar phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious redesigns; see second-system effect. See also creeping elegance.
  • creeping paralysis — any slow process that causes a system, government, etc, to stop working efficiently
  • cumulative scoring — a method of scoring in which the score of a partnership is taken as the sum of their scores on all hands played.
  • dead man's fingers — a soft coral, Alcyonium digitatum, with long finger-like polyps
  • dead-man's fingers — any of various fungi, sponges, plant roots, animal parts, etc., having fingerlike projections and a pale or dull color, as the gray-black woodland fungus Xylaria polymorpha or the whitish spongy gills of a food crab.
  • dead-stick landing — Aeronautics, Aerospace. a landing of an airplane or space vehicle with the engine cut off.
  • detective sergeant — a police officer who investigates crime and who ranks above a detective constable but below a detective inspector
  • diagnostic testing — Diagnostic testing is the testing of a vehicle, or one of its systems or parts, in order to identify why it is not working properly.
  • digital humanities — (used with a singular verb) the study of literature, philosophy, etc., as facilitated by computer technology or digital media: Digital humanities uses data analysis to find patterns in large bodies of text. the set of methodologies used in such scholarship.
  • digital signatures — digital signature
  • digital television — a television broadcasting technology in which signals are transmitted as a sequence of binary numbers.
  • directional signal — any of four signal lights on the front left, front right, rear left, and rear right of an automotive vehicle that, when actuated by the driver, flash in pairs on the side toward which a turn is to be made.
  • discharge printing — a fabric-printing method in which the material is dyed and then certain areas are discharged so as to permit the original hue or its color replacement to act as a pattern against the colored ground.
  • distracted driving — driving a vehicle while engaging in an activity that has the potential to distract the driver from the task of driving: Bans on cell phone use in cars will help to reduce the dangers of distracted driving.
  • dressing table set — a set including a hairbrush, mirror and comb, often with silver backs
  • dwarf storage unit — (humour)   (DSU) An IBM term for a cupboard.
  • earnings per share — the net income of a corporation divided by the total number of shares of its common stock outstanding at a given time. Abbreviation: EPS.
  • eastern algonquian — a subgroup of the Algonquian language family, comprising the languages spoken aboriginally from Nova Scotia to northeastern North Carolina.
  • eclipsing variable — a variable star whose changes in brightness are caused by periodic eclipses of two stars in a binary system.
  • eggshell porcelain — a type of very thin translucent porcelain originally made in China
  • electroretinograms — Plural form of electroretinogram.
  • endangered species — animal, plant becoming extinct
  • equinoctial spring — either of the two highest spring tides that occur at the equinoxes
  • ethnomusicological — Relating to or pertaining to ethnomusicology.
  • ethnopsychological — Relating to ethnopsychology.
  • evolution strategy — (ES) A kind of evolutionary algorithm where individuals (potential solutions) are encoded by a set of real-valued "object variables" (the individual's "genome"). For each object variable an individual also has a "strategy variable" which determines the degree of mutation to be applied to the corresponding object variable. The strategy variables also mutate, allowing the rate of mutation of the object variables to vary. An ES is characterised by the population size, the number of offspring produced in each generation and whether the new population is selected from parents and offspring or only from the offspring. ES were invented in 1963 by Ingo Rechenberg, Hans-Paul Schwefel at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) while searching for the optimal shapes of bodies in a flow.
  • exhaustive testing — (programming)   Executing a program with all possible combinations of inputs or values for program variables.
  • far eastern region — former name of Khabarovsk.
  • farewell-to-spring — a slender, showy plant, Clarkia amoena, of the evening primrose family, native to western North America, having satiny, cup-shaped, lilac-crimson or reddish-pink flowers and roundish fruit.
  • feeping creaturism — /fee'ping kree"ch*r-izm/ A deliberate spoonerism for creeping featurism, meant to imply that the system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of hacks. This term isn"t really well defined, but it sounds so neat that most hackers have said or heard it. It is probably reinforced by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their customary noises.
  • flash butt welding — a method of welding metal edge-to-edge with a powerful electric flash followed by the application of pressure.
  • forwarding address — address for mail to be sent on
  • fragile x syndrome — a widespread form of mental retardation caused by a faulty gene on the X chromosome.
  • fragile-x syndrome — an inherited condition characterized by learning disability: affected individuals have an X-chromosome that is easily damaged under certain conditions
  • fuel-saving device — a device that increases the fuel efficiency of a vehicle, so that it uses less fuel for a further distance
  • functional testing — (testing)   (Or "black-box testing", "closed-box testing") The application of test data derived from functional requirements without regard to how the system is implemented.
  • funding operations — the conversion of government floating stock or short-term debt into holdings of long-term bonds
  • galilean satellite — any of the four large satellites of the planet Jupiter – Io, Europa, Ganymede, or Callisto – discovered in 1610 by Galileo
  • galilean telescope — a refracting telescope that forms an erect image, consisting of an objective of relatively long focal length that causes light rays to converge and an eyepiece of short focal length that causes them to diverge.
  • garden loosestrife — any of various plants belonging to the genus Lysimachia, of the primrose family, having clusters of usually yellow flowers, as L. vulgaris (garden loosestrife) or L. quadrifolia (whorled loosestrife)
  • gastroenterologist — the study of the structure, functions, and diseases of digestive organs.
  • general anesthesia — induced unconsciousness
  • general confession — a prayer confessing sins
  • general precession — the precession that results from both lunisolar precession and planetary precession; precession of the equinoxes.
  • general san martin — a city in E Argentina, a suburb of Buenos Aires.
  • generating station — a power station
  • genetic algorithms — genetic algorithm
  • geneva conventions — one of a series of international agreements, first made in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1864, establishing rules for the humane treatment of prisoners of war and of the sick, the wounded, and the dead in battle.
  • gensym corporation — (company)   A company that supplies software and services for intelligent operations management. Common applications include quality management, process optimisation, dynamic scheduling, network management, energy and environmental management, and process modelling and simulation. Their products include G2.
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