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

  • gender reassignment — the alteration, by surgery and hormone treatments, of a person's physical sex characteristics to approximate those of the opposite sex: Born male, she now lives as a woman but has no plans for a sex change.
  • general anaesthesia — the use of a general anaesthetic
  • general anaesthetic — sth administered to induce unconsciousness
  • general linguistics — the study of the characteristics of language in general rather than of a particular language; theoretical, rather than applied, linguistics.
  • general partnership — a partnership in which each of the partners is fully liable for the firm's debts.
  • general post office — (in the U.S. postal system) the main post office of a city, county, etc., that also has branch post offices. Abbreviation: G.P.O., GPO.
  • generic array logic — (hardware, integrated circuit)   (GAL) A newer kind of Programmable Array Logic based on EEPROM storage cells, been pioneered by Lattice. GALs can be erased and reprogrammed and usually replace a whole set of different PALs (hence the name).
  • generic programming — (programming)   A programming technique which aims to make programs more adaptable by making them more general. Generic programs often embody non-traditional kinds of polymorphism; ordinary programs are obtained from them by suitably instantiating their parameters. In contrast with normal programs, the parameters of a generic programs are often quite rich in structure. For example they may be other programs, types or type constructors or even programming paradigms.
  • genetic programming — (programming)   (GP) A programming technique which extends the genetic algorithm to the domain of whole computer programs. In GP, populations of programs are genetically bred to solve problems. Genetic programming can solve problems of system identification, classification, control, robotics, optimisation, game playing, and pattern recognition. Starting with a primordial ooze of hundreds or thousands of randomly created programs composed of functions and terminals appropriate to the problem, the population is progressively evolved over a series of generations by applying the operations of Darwinian fitness proportionate reproduction and crossover (sexual recombination).
  • gentile da fabriano — 1370?–1427, Italian painter.
  • gentleman-pensioner — (formerly) a gentleman-at-arms.
  • geocentric parallax — the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer.
  • geomagnetic equator — an imaginary line on the earth's surface, the plane of which passes through the center and is midway between the geomagnetic poles.
  • geothermal gradient — the increase in temperature with increasing depth within the earth.
  • gestational carrier — surrogate mother (def 3).
  • 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
  • give a person a fit — to surprise a person in an outrageous manner
  • glottalic airstream — a current of air in the pharynx produced by the action of the glottis.
  • glyceryl trinitrate — nitroglycerin.
  • gold-rimmed glasses — spectacles with gold-coloured frames
  • golden lion tamarin — a monkey, Leontopithecus rosalia rosalia, of tropical rain forests of southeastern Brazil, having a silky golden coat and a long golden mane: threatened with extinction.
  • grade point average — a measure of scholastic attainment computed by dividing the total number of grade points received by the total number of credits or hours of course work taken.
  • grammatical meaning — the meaning of an inflectional morpheme or of some other syntactic device, as word order.
  • grand duke nicholas — of Cusa [kyoo-zuh] /ˈkyu zə/ (Show IPA), 1401–1464, German cardinal, mathematician, and philosopher. German Nikolaus von Cusa.
  • grandfather's chair — wing chair.
  • granuloma inguinale — a venereal disease marked by deep ulceration of the skin of the groin and external genitals, caused by the bacterium Calymmatobacterium granulomatis.
  • gravitational field — the attractive effect, considered as extending throughout space, of matter on other matter.
  • great idaean mother — Cybele.
  • great indian desert — a desert in NW India and S Pakistan. About 77,000 sq. mi. (200,000 sq. km).
  • great wall of china — a system of fortified walls with a roadway along the top, constructed as a defense for China against the nomads of the regions that are now Mongolia and Manchuria: completed in the 3rd century b.c., but later repeatedly modified and rebuilt. 2000 miles (3220 km) long.
  • great-grandchildren — a grandchild of one's son or daughter.
  • green mountain boys — the members of the armed bands of Vermont organized in 1770 to oppose New York's territorial claims. Under Ethan Allen they won fame in the War of American Independence
  • greenstick fracture — an incomplete fracture of a long bone, in which one side is broken and the other side is still intact.
  • greenwich mean time — the time as measured on the prime meridian running through Greenwich, England: used in England and as a standard of calculation elsewhere.
  • gregorian telescope — a telescope similar in design to the Cassegrainian telescope but less widely used.
  • grievance committee — a group of representatives chosen from a labor union or from both labor and management to consider and remedy workers' grievances.
  • grievance procedure — the established series of steps to be taken in dealing with a grievance raised with an employer by an employee
  • grosse pointe farms — a city in SE Michigan, near Detroit.
  • ground-plane aerial — a quarter-wave vertical dipole aerial in which the electrical image forming the other quarter-wave section is formed by reflection in a system of radially disposed metal rods or in a conductive sheet
  • guerrilla financing — the use of unconventional and marginally legal means to capitalize enterprises
  • guillaume de lorris — 13th-century French poet who wrote the first 4058 lines of the allegorical romance, the Roman de la rose, continued by Jean de Meung
  • gulf of carpentaria — a shallow inlet of the Arafura Sea, in N Australia between Arnhem Land and Cape York Peninsula
  • hairdryer treatment — (esp in sport) the practice of shouting at someone at close quarters in order to express one's displeasure at something he or she has done
  • hairy cell leukemia — a form of cancer in which abnormal cells with many hairlike cytoplasmic projections appear in the bone marrow, liver, spleen, and blood.
  • half wave rectifier — A half wave rectifier removes the negative component of an alternating signal leaving only the positive part.
  • half-wave rectifier — a rectifier that changes only one half of a cycle of alternating current into a pulsating, direct current.
  • halt and catch fire — (humour, processor)   (HCF) Any of several undocumented and semi-mythical machine instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back as the IBM 360. The Motorola 6800 microprocessor was the first for which an HCF opcode became widely known. This instruction caused the processor to read every memory location sequentially until reset.
  • hamiltonian problem — (computability)   (Or "Hamilton's problem") A problem in graph theory posed by William Hamilton: given a graph, is there a path through the graph which visits each vertex precisely once (a "Hamiltonian path")? Is there a Hamiltonian path which ends up where it started (a "Hamiltonian cycle" or "Hamiltonian tour")? Hamilton's problem is NP-complete. It has numerous applications, sometimes completely unexpected, in computing.
  • hang five (or ten) — to ride a surfboard with the toes of one (or both) feet draped over the front edge of the board
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