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18-letter words containing a, e, r, i

  • 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.
  • farmer in the dell — a game, accompanied by a song with several verses, in which one person, designated as the farmer, occupies the center of a circle of persons and is joined in the circle by other players designated as wife, child, nurse, cat, rat, and cheese, these then leaving the circle in order except for the one designated as cheese, who is left standing alone in the circle at the end.
  • fatty degeneration — deterioration of the cells of the body, accompanied by the formation of fat globules within the diseased cells.
  • 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.
  • feldenkrais method — a system of gentle movements that promote flexibility, coordination, and self-awareness
  • ferdinand magellan — Ferdinand, c1480–1521, Portuguese navigator: discoverer of the Straits of Magellan 1520 and the Philippines 1521.
  • ferdinand schiller — Ferdinand Canning Scott [kan-ing] /ˈkæn ɪŋ/ (Show IPA), 1864–1937, English philosopher in the U.S.
  • fermat's principle — Optics. the law that the path taken by a ray of light in going from one point to another point will be the path that requires the least time.
  • ferrite-rod aerial — a type of aerial, normally used in radio reception, consisting of a small coil of wire mounted on a ferrite core, the coil serving as a tuning inductance
  • fettuccine alfredo — fettuccine in cream sauce with grated Parmesan cheese.
  • fifth monarchy men — (during the Commonwealth in the 17th century) a militant sect of Puritans who identified the fifth monarchy with the millennial reign of Christ and who believed they should help to inaugurate that reign by force.
  • financial services — A company or organization that provides financial services is able to help you do things such as make investments or buy a pension or mortgage.
  • fire and brimstone — When people talk about fire and brimstone, they are referring to hell and how they think people are punished there after death.
  • fire-and-brimstone — threatening punishment in the hereafter: a fire-and-brimstone sermon.
  • firecracker flower — a plant, Dichelostemma ida-maia, of the amaryllis family, native to California and Oregon, having clusters of tubular scarlet flowers.
  • first and foremost — primarily
  • first class module — (programming)   A module that is a first class data object of the programming language, e.g. a record containing functions. In a functional language, it is standard to have first class programs, so program building blocks can have the same status.
  • first year infants — a class for young children who have just started school
  • fischer von erlach — Johann Bernhard [yaw-hahn bern-hahrt] /ˈyɔ hɑn ˈbɛrn hɑrt/ (Show IPA), 1656–1723, Austrian architect.
  • fissure of rolando — central sulcus.
  • fixed-focus camera — a camera with an unadjustable focal length and with a relatively large depth of field.
  • fixed-radio access — Wireless Local Loop
  • fixed-term tenancy — a tenancy arrangement for a particular and fixed period
  • flat-bottomed rail — a rail having a cross section like an inverted T, with the top extremity enlarged slightly to form the head
  • floating underflow — underflow
  • floating-rate note — a eurobond, often issued as a negotiable bearer bond, that has a floating rate of interest
  • fore-edge painting — a technique of painting a picture on the fore edge of a book, often in such a manner that only when the pages are slightly fanned the picture is revealed.
  • foreign-trade zone — free port (def 1).
  • forgive and forget — be reconciled
  • formal equivalence — the relation that holds between two open sentences when their universal closures are materially equivalent
  • forward compatible — forward compatibility
  • forwarding address — address for mail to be sent on
  • foundation garment — an undergarment, as a girdle or corset, worn by women to support or give shape to the contours of the body.
  • 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
  • fragmentation bomb — a bomb designed to break into many small, high-velocity fragments when detonated.
  • frederick douglass — Frederick, 1817–95, U.S. ex-slave, abolitionist, and orator.
  • free-range chicken — a chicken kept in natural nonintensive conditions
  • french west africa — a former French federation in W Africa, including Dahomey (now Benin), French Guinea, French Sudan (now Mali), Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Upper Volta (now Burkina Fasso).
  • fringe-toed lizard — an iguanid lizard, Uma notata, of sandy deserts of the western U.S. and Mexico, having a wedge-shaped snout and toes fringed with long, pointed scales.
  • ftp software, inc. — (company)   Developers of the original PC/TCP Packet Driver specification. Address: 26 Princess St. Wakefield, MA 01880-3004. Telephone: +1 (617) 246 0900.
  • fulminating powder — powder that explodes by percussion.
  • funding operations — the conversion of government floating stock or short-term debt into holdings of long-term bonds
  • funeral procession — ceremonial cortège at a burial
  • gabriele dannunzio — Gabriele [Italian gah-bree-e-le] /Italian ˌgɑ briˈɛ lɛ/ (Show IPA), (Duca Minimo) 1863–1938, Italian soldier, novelist, and poet.
  • garbage collection — (programming)   (GC) The process by which dynamically allocated storage is reclaimed during the execution of a program. The term usually refers to automatic periodic storage reclamation by the garbage collector (part of the run-time system), as opposed to explicit code to free specific blocks of memory. Automatic garbage collection is usually triggered during memory allocation when the amount free memory falls below some threshold or after a certain number of allocations. Normal execution is suspended and the garbage collector is run. There are many variations on this basic scheme. Languages like Lisp represent expressions as graphs built from cells which contain pointers and data. These languages use automatic dynamic storage allocation to build expressions. During the evaluation of an expression it is necessary to reclaim space which is used by subexpressions but which is no longer pointed to by anything. This reclaimed memory is returned to the free memory pool for subsequent reallocation. Without garbage collection the program's memory requirements would increase monotonically throughout execution, possibly exceeding system limits on virtual memory size. The three main methods are mark-sweep garbage collection, reference counting and copying garbage collection. See also the AI koan about garbage collection.
  • 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)
  • gas-discharge tube — any tube in which an electric discharge takes place through a gas
  • gastroenterologist — the study of the structure, functions, and diseases of digestive organs.
  • general anesthesia — induced unconsciousness
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