21-letter words containing a, f, e
- degradation of energy — the principle that during any irreversible process the total energy available to do work decreases.
- delusions of grandeur — If someone has delusions of grandeur, they think and behave as if they are much more important or powerful than they really are.
- demand-pull inflation — inflation in which rising demand results in a rise in prices.
- department of defense — the department of the U.S. federal government charged with ensuring that the military capacity of the U.S. is adequate to safeguard the national security. Abbreviation: DOD.
- department of justice — the department of the U.S. federal government charged with the responsibility for the enforcement of federal laws. Abbreviation: DOJ.
- detoxification centre — a place that specializes in the treatment of alcoholism or drug addiction
- dictionary definition — the meaning of a word as given in a dictionary or dictionaries
- differential analyzer — an analog computer designed for solving certain differential equations.
- differential calculus — the branch of mathematics that deals with differentials and derivatives.
- differential equation — an equation involving differentials or derivatives.
- differential geometry — the branch of mathematics that deals with the application of the principles of differential and integral calculus to the study of curves and surfaces.
- differential operator — a function, usually expressed as a polynomial, that indicates linear combinations of the derivatives of the expression on which it operates.
- differential quotient — derivative (def 6).
- differential topology — the branch of topology that studies the properties of differentiable manifolds that remain invariant under diffeomorphisms.
- differential windlass — a pair of hoisting drums of different diameter turning at the same rate, such that a pulley suspended below them on a line wound on the larger drum and unwound from the smaller drum is raised with mechanical advantage.
- differential-quotient — something that has been derived.
- downhole safety valve — A downhole safety valve is a piece of safety equipment used inside a well, which isolates wellbore pressure and fluid if something bad happens.
- draft once reuse many — (jargon) (DORUM) Reusing parts of a document to produce parts of an entirely new document. The term normally refers to text documents but the practise is equally common in programming.
- drop the handkerchief — a children's game in which all the players but one stand in a circle facing inward, while that one player stealthily drops a handkerchief behind a player in the circle who must pursue and attempt to catch the one who dropped the handkerchief before the latter reaches the vacated place.
- dumfries and galloway — a region in S Scotland. 2460 sq. mi. (6371 sq. km).
- dwarf japanese quince — a low, shrubby, Japanese flowering quince, Chaenomeles japonica, of the rose family, having salmon-to-orange flowers and yellow fruit.
- electromagnetic field — a field of force associated with a moving electric charge equivalent to an electric field and a magnetic field at right angles to each other and to the direction of propagation
- ethics of the fathers — a treatise of the Mishnah that comprises six chapters and consists chiefly of proverbs, aphorisms, and principles of ethics, law, and religion.
- faculty board meeting — a meeting of the governing body of a faculty
- fall all over oneself — to drop or descend under the force of gravity, as to a lower place through loss or lack of support.
- fall ill/be taken ill — If you fall ill or are taken ill, you suddenly become ill.
- false memory syndrome — a psychological condition in which a person believes that he or she remembers events that have not actually occurred.
- false-memory syndrome — a psychological condition in which a person believes that he or she remembers events that have not actually occurred.
- federal reserve board — a U.S. federal banking system that is under the control of a central board of governors (Federal Reserve Board) with a central bank (Federal Reserve Bank) in each of 12 districts and that has wide powers in controlling credit and the flow of money as well as in performing other functions, as regulating and supervising its member banks.
- feline leukemia virus — a retrovirus, mainly affecting cats, that depresses the immune system and leads to opportunistic infections, lymphosarcoma, and other disorders. Abbreviation: FeLV, FLV.
- fermat's last theorem — the unproved theorem that the equation xn + yn = zn has no solution for x, y, z nonzero integers when n is greater than 2.
- ferric sodium oxalate — an emerald-green, crystalline, extremely water-soluble salt, used in photography and blueprinting.
- file allocation table — (file system) (FAT) The component of an MS-DOS or Windows 95 file system which describes the files, directories, and free space on a hard disk or floppy disk. A disk is divided into partitions. Under the FAT file system each partition is divided into clusters, each of which can be one or more sectors, depending on the size of the partition. Each cluster is either allocated to a file or directory or it is free (unused). A directory lists the name, size, modification time and starting cluster of each file or subdirectory it contains. At the start of the partition is a table (the FAT) with one entry for each cluster. Each entry gives the number of the next cluster in the same file or a special value for "not allocated" or a special value for "this is the last cluster in the chain". The first few clusters after the FAT contain the root directory. The FAT file system was originally created for the CP/M[?] operating system where files were catalogued using 8-bit addressing. MS DOS's FAT allows only 8.3 filenames. With the introduction of MS-DOS 4 an incompatible 16-bit FAT (FAT16) with 32-kilobyte clusters was introduced that allowed partitions of up to 2 gigabytes. Microsoft later created FAT32 to support partitions larger than two gigabytes and pathnames greater that 256 characters. It also allows more efficient use of disk space since clusters are four kilobytes rather than 32 kilobytes. FAT32 was first available in OEM Service Release 2 of Windows 95 in 1996. It is not fully backward compatible with the 16-bit and 8-bit FATs. Compare: NTFS.
- financial times index — one of the indexes of share prices produced by the Financial Times, especially the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index
- financial underwriter — A financial underwriter is an insurance employee working in financial underwriting.
- finite state automata — Finite State Machine
- first-dollar coverage — insurance that provides payment for the full loss up to the insured amount with no deductibles.
- flat-coated retriever — one of an English breed of large sporting dogs having a flat, dense, shiny black or liver-colored coat, small ears, and long jaws, used for retrieving game from both water and land.
- flotation compartment — in a boat, an enclosed section filled with air or gas to give buoyancy
- food conversion ratio — a ratio expressing the weight of food required to produce a unit gain in the live weight of an animal
- food standards agency — the full form of FDA
- foot-in-mouth disease — the habit of making inappropriate, insensitive, or imprudent statements.
- foreign exchange rate — the rate that specifies how much the currency of a nation is worth in terms of the currency of another nation
- forensic anthropology — the branch of physical anthropology in which anthropological data, criteria, and techniques are used to determine the sex, age, genetic population, or parentage of skeletal or biological materials in questions of civil or criminal law.
- fort lesley j. mcnair — a military reservation in SW Washington, D.C., on the Potomac River, SW of the Capitol.
- forward exchange rate — the exchange rate of a currency to be delivered at a later date
- fractional extraction — Fractional extraction is a process of extracting a liquid from a liquid, in which two solutes are separated, with one leaving in the extract and one in the raffinate.
- fragmentation grenade — a grenade with a heavy metal casing that shatters, on exploding, into fragments that travel at high speed and with great force.
- framing specification — A specification of the "protocol bits" that surround the "data bits" on a communications channel to allow the data to be "framed" into chunks, like start and stop bits in EIA-232. It allows a receiver to synchronize at points along the data stream.
- franco-belgian system — French system.