16-letter words containing a, f, r, e
- fancy dress ball — a ball at which the guests wear fancy dress
- fandango on core — (jargon, programming) (Unix/C, from the Mexican dance) In C, a wild pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a core dump, or corrupts the malloc arena in such a way as to cause mysterious failures later on, is sometimes said to have "done a fandango on core". On low-end personal machines without an MMU, this can corrupt the operating system itself, causing massive lossage. Other frenetic dances such as the rhumba, cha-cha, or watusi, may be substituted. See aliasing bug, precedence lossage, smash the stack, memory leak, memory smash, overrun screw, core.
- farewell address — (initial capital letters) U.S. History. a statement that President George Washington published in a Philadelphia newspaper in 1796 to announce that he would not run for a third term and to give his views on foreign and domestic policy.
- farewell to arms — a novel (1929) by Ernest Hemingway.
- farmer's reducer — a solution of ferricyanide and hypo for reducing density and increasing contrast in a negative.
- farmhouse cheese — cheese that is made by traditional methods, on or as if on a farm
- fashion designer — creator of clothing designs
- father christmas — Santa Claus.
- father confessor — confessor (def 2).
- father-surrogate — a male who replaces an absent father and becomes an object of attachment.
- feather geranium — a Eurasian weed, Chenopodium botrys, of the amaranth family, having clusters of inconspicuous flowers and unpleasant smelling, lobed leaves.
- feather merchant — a person who avoids responsibility and effort; loafer.
- feature creature — [Possibly from slang "creature feature" for a horror movie] 1. One who loves to add features to designs or programs, perhaps at the expense of coherence, concision or taste. 2. Alternately, a mythical being that induces otherwise rational programmers to perpetrate such crocks. See also feeping creaturism, creeping featurism.
- federal district — a district in which the national government of a country is located, especially one in Latin America.
- federal register — a bulletin, published daily by the U.S. federal government, containing the schedule of hearings before Congressional and federal agency committees, together with orders, proclamations, etc., released by the executive branch of the government.
- federalist party — a political group that favored the adoption by the states of the Constitution.
- federated church — a church whose membership includes two or more congregations of different denominational affiliation.
- federation wheat — an early-maturing drought-resistant variety of wheat developed by William Farrar in 1902
- feedback control — (electronics) A control system which monitors its effect on the system it is controlling and modifies its output accordingly. For example, a thermostat has two inputs: the desired temperature and the current temperature (the latter is the feedback). The output of the thermostat changes so as to try to equalise the two inputs. Computer disk drives use feedback control to position the read/write heads accurately on a recording track. Complex systems such as the human body contain many feedback systems that interact with each other; the homeostasis mechanisms that control body temperature and acidity are good examples.
- feel constrained — If you feel constrained to do something, you feel that you must do it, even though you would prefer not to.
- feel the draught — to be short of money
- feel-good factor — When journalists refer to the feel-good factor, they mean that people are feeling hopeful and optimistic about the future.
- feeping creature — [feeping creaturism] An unnecessary feature; a bit of chrome that, in the speaker's judgment, is the camel's nose for a whole horde of new features.
- feira de santana — a city in BahÍa state, E Brazil.
- fellow passenger — a person travelling on the same vehicle, plane, ship etc as you
- fellow traveller — a companion on a journey
- feme-sole trader — a married woman who is entitled to carry on business on her own account and responsibility, independently of her husband.
- feminine caesura — a caesura occurring immediately after an unstressed or short syllable.
- femme de chambre — a chambermaid
- ferdinand marcos — Ferdinand E(dralin) [ed-ruh-lin] /ˈɛd rə lɪn/ (Show IPA), 1917–1989, Philippine political leader: president 1965–86.
- fermat's theorem — the theorem that an integer raised to a prime power leaves the same remainder as the integer itself when divided by the prime.
- ferricyanic acid — a brown, crystalline, unstable, water-soluble solid, H 3 Fe(CN) 6 , obtained by the interaction of a ferricyanide and an acid.
- ferrocyanic acid — a white, crystalline, unstable, water-soluble solid, H 4 Fe(CN) 6 , obtained by the interaction of a ferrocyanide and an acid.
- ferrous sulphate — an iron salt with a saline taste, usually obtained as greenish crystals of the heptahydrate, which are converted to the white monohydrate above 100°C: used in inks, tanning, water purification, and in the treatment of anaemia. Formula: FeSO4
- fertile material — material which can be converted into a fissile material by a neutron-induced nuclear reaction, as uranium-238 or thorium-232
- fertility factor — a sex-determining chromosome or gene.
- feulgen reaction — a reaction in which an aldehyde combines with a modified Schiff's reagent to produce a purplish compound: used especially to test for the presence of DNA
- fibonacci number — a number in the Fibonacci sequence, each of which is the sum of the previous two
- fibonacci series — a sequence of integers in which each integer (Fibonacci number) after the second is the sum of the two preceding integers; specif., the series 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, . . .
- fielding average — a measure of the fielding ability of a player, obtained by dividing the number of put-outs and assists by the number of put-outs, assists, and errors and carrying out the result to three decimal places. A player with ten errors in 600 chances has a fielding average of .984.
- fifth-generation — denoting developments in computer design to produce machines with artificial intelligence
- filter cigarette — a cigarette with a filter tip
- filterable virus — a virus particle small enough to pass through a filter of diatomaceous earth or porcelain, which will not pass bacteria: chiefly historical or an informal indicator of size, as synthetic membrane filters now permit passage of the smallest virus.
- finance director — financial manager
- finance minister — a member of a government in charge of the financial affairs of a state etc
- fingertip search — When the police carry out a fingertip search of a place, they examine it for evidence in a very detailed way.
- fire regulations — rules intended to make sure that people and property stay safe in the event of a fire
- firewall machine — (networking, security) A dedicated gateway server with special security precautions on it, used to service external connections (typically from the public Internet). The firewall machine protects servers and networks hidden behind it from crackers. The typical firewall is an inexpensive microprocessor-based Unix machine with no critical data, with public network ports on it, but just one carefully watched connection back to the rest of the cluster. The special precautions may include threat monitoring, call-back, and even a complete iron box keyable to particular incoming IDs or activity patterns. The type of network and security environment of a firewall machine is often called a De-Militarised Zone (DMZ). It may contain other servers such as e-mail servers or proxy gateways - machines that need to be publicly accessible but also need some access to internal systems. Also known as a (Venus) flytrap after the insect-eating plant.
- firework display — a public event at which fireworks are set alight
- first derivative — the derivative of a function: Velocity is the first derivative of distance with respect to time.