21-letter words containing a, e, r, i
- greater sunda islands — a group of islands in the W Malay Archipelago, forming the larger part of the Sunda Islands: consists of Borneo, Sumatra, Java, and Sulawesi
- green river ordinance — a local ordinance banning door-to-door selling.
- greenwich observatory — the national astronomical observatory of Great Britain, housed in a castle in E Sussex; formerly located at Greenwich.
- gretna green marriage — marriage without parental consent; elopement.
- ground-effect machine — ACV (def 2).
- guaranteed scheduling — (algorithm) A scheduling algorithm used in multitasking operating systems that guarantees fairness by monitoring the amount of CPU time spent by each user and allocating resources accordingly.
- harriet beecher stowe — Harriet (Elizabeth) Beecher, 1811–96, U.S. abolitionist and novelist.
- have the inside track — If you say that someone has the inside track, you mean that they have an advantage, for example special knowledge about something.
- hawaiian honeycreeper — any small to medium-sized finches of the subfamily Drepanidinae, native to the Hawaiian Islands and including many rare and extinct species.
- hazard warning device — an appliance fitted to a motor vehicle that operates the hazard lights
- heliocentric parallax — the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer.
- help a person on with — to assist a person in the putting on of (clothes)
- hierarchical database — (database) A kind of database management system that links records together like a family tree such that each record type has only one owner, e.g. an order is owned by only one customer. Hierarchical structures were widely used in the first mainframe database management systems. However, due to their restrictions, they often cannot be used to relate structures that exist in the real world.
- highest common factor — greatest common divisor. Abbreviation: H.C.F.
- hildegard (of bingen) — Saint(1098-1179); Ger. nun, composer, & mystic: her day is Sept. 17
- hindu-arabic numerals — Arabic numeral.
- historic places trust — (in New Zealand) the statutory body concerned with the conservation of historic buildings, esp with ancient Māori sites
- home improvement loan — a government loan for house improvements such as insulation, adding a bathroom, or urgent repairs
- horizontal stabilizer — the horizontal surface, usually fixed, of an aircraft empennage, to which the elevator is hinged.
- hyperbolic paraboloid — a paraboloid that can be put into a position such that its sections parallel to one coordinate plane are hyperbolas, with its sections parallel to the other two coordinate planes being parabolas.
- hypercholesterolaemia — the condition of having a high concentration of cholesterol in the blood
- hyperlipoproteinaemia — the condition of having an abnormally high level of lipoproteins in the blood
- hysterosalpingography — (medicine) X-ray examination of the uterus and oviducts following injection of a radiopaque substance.
- identical proposition — a proposition in which the subject and predicate have the same meaning, as, “That which is mortal is not immortal.”.
- identification papers — documents that serve to establish someone's identity
- identification parade — a group of persons including one suspected of having committed a crime assembled for the purpose of discovering whether a witness can identify the suspect
- imprecise probability — (probability) A probability that is represented as an interval (as opposed to a single number) included in [0,1].
- in (or out of) phase — in (or not in) a state of exactly parallel movements, oscillations, etc.; in (or not in) synchronization
- in (or out of) place — in (or out of) the customary, proper, or assigned place
- in a state of undress — If someone is in a state of undress, they do not have all their clothes on.
- in good circumstances — (of a person) in a good financial situation
- in more ways than one — You say in more ways than one to indicate that what you have said is intended to have more than one meaning.
- in no uncertain terms — If you say that someone tells a person something in no uncertain terms, you are emphasizing that they say it strongly and clearly so that there is no doubt about what they mean.
- in saecula saeculorum — for ever and ever.
- in the first instance — You say in the first instance to mention something that is the first step in a series of actions.
- indicated horse-power — the horsepower of a reciprocating engine as shown by an indicator record. Abbreviation: ihp, IHP.
- indigenous australian — another name for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
- indo-australian plate — a major tectonic division of the earth's crust, comprising India and the Australian continent and adjacent suboceanic basins (the Tasman, South Australian, Mid-Indian, Cocos, and Australian basins); separated from the Eurasian Plate by the Java Trench, from the Pacific Plate by the Tonga-Kermadec Trench, and from the African Plate by a series of mid-ocean ridges (the Carlsberg, Mid-Indian, and Southeast Indian ridges).
- induced radioactivity — artificial radioactivity.
- industrial revolution — (sometimes initial capital letters) the totality of the changes in economic and social organization that began about 1760 in England and later in other countries, characterized chiefly by the replacement of hand tools with power-driven machines, as the power loom and the steam engine, and by the concentration of industry in large establishments.
- infant mortality rate — number of babies dying
- infant welfare clinic — a medical facility that specializes in the health and well-being of young babies
- infectious ectromelia — ectromelia (def 2).
- infertility treatment — treatment aimed at helping a couple conceive
- inflationary universe — a version of the big bang theory in which the universe underwent very rapid growth during the first fraction of a second before it settled down to its current rate of expansion.
- information appliance — (hardware) (IA) A consumer device that performs only a few targeted tasks and is controlled by a simple touch-screen interface or push buttons on the device's enclosure.
- information gathering — the process of collecting information about something
- information retrieval — the systematic storage and recovery of data, as from a file, card catalog, or the memory bank of a computer. Abbreviation: IR.
- information scientist — someone who works in information science
- inner spring mattress — a mattress with a system of wire coils or springs inside for buoyancy or comfort purposes