0%

20-letter words containing a, i, r, l, e, t

  • fore-and-aft topsail — gaff topsail (def 1).
  • forty-ninth parallel — an informal name for the Canadian border with the USA, which is in part delineated by the parallel line of latitude at 49°N
  • fourth international — a loose federation of small groups of radical socialists formed in 1936 under the leadership of Leon Trotsky and hostile to the Soviet Union. Compare international (def 6).
  • freefall parachuting — a variety of parachuting in which the jumper manoeuvres in free fall before opening the parachute
  • frequency modulation — FM.
  • fridtjof nansen land — Franz Josef Land.
  • front-end volatility — Front-end volatility is the ability of the fractions with lower boiling points, such as butane, to evaporate at normal temperatures.
  • fulminate of mercury — a gray, crystalline solid, Hg(CNO) 2 , used chiefly in the manufacture of commercial and military detonators.
  • fundamental particle — elementary particle.
  • general postal union — former name of Universal Postal Union. Abbreviation: GPU.
  • general practitioner — a medical practitioner whose practice is not limited to any specific branch of medicine or class of diseases. Abbreviation: G.P.
  • generative phonology — a theory of phonology that uses a set of rules to derive phonetic representations from abstract underlying forms.
  • get away from it all — If you get away from it all, you have a holiday in a place that is very different from where you normally live and work.
  • girdle-tailed lizard — any African lizard of the family Cordylidae, having a spiny tail used in defense.
  • go like the clappers — to move extremely fast
  • gorno-altai republic — a constituent republic of S Russia: mountainous, rising over 4350 m (14 500 ft) in the Altai Mountains of the south. Capital: Gorno-Altaisk. Pop: 202 900 (2002). Area: 92 600 sq km (35 740 sq miles)
  • grand right and left — a figure called in square dancing in which partners face each other, forming a small circle, and then advance around the circle by extending alternating right and left hands to pull past each new person until they reach their partners again.
  • graphics accelerator — (graphics, hardware)   Hardware (often an extra circuit board) to perform tasks such as plotting lines and surfaces in two or three dimensions, filling, shading and hidden line removal.
  • gravimetric analysis — analysis by weight.
  • great-circle sailing — sailing between two points more or less according to an arc of a great circle, in practice almost always using a series of rhumb lines of different bearings to approximate the arc, whose own bearing changes constantly unless it coincides with a meridian or the equator.
  • hard gelatin capsule — A hard gelatin capsule is a type of capsule that is usually used to contain medicine in the form of dry powder or very small pellets.
  • health questionnaire — A health questionnaire is a list of questions about someone's health issued by underwriters before accepting a person as a risk.
  • helicopter parenting — a style of child rearing in which an overprotective mother or father discourages a child's independence by being too involved in the child's life: In typical helicopter parenting, a mother or father swoops in at any sign of challenge or discomfort.
  • heston and isleworth — a former borough, now part of Hounslow, in SE England, near London.
  • heteropolysaccharide — (carbohydrate) any polysaccharide formed from two or more different kinds of monosaccharide.
  • hexafluoroantimonate — (inorganic chemistry) The anion SbF6- or any salt containing this anion; it is used as an acidic catalyst in epoxide opening reactions.
  • hierarchical routing — The complex problem of routing on large networks can be simplified by breaking a network into a hierarchy of smaller networks, where each level is responsible for its own routing. The Internet has, basically, three levels: the backbones, the mid-levels, and the stub networks. The backbones know how to route between the mid-levels, the mid-levels know how to route between the sites, and each site (being an autonomous system) knows how to route internally. See also Exterior Gateway Protocol, Interior Gateway Protocol, transit network.
  • high-energy particle — Physics
  • hipparchus satellite — an astronometric satellite launched in 1989 by the European Space Agency that measured the position, proper motion, and brightness of 118 218 stars down to 12th magnitude and the magnitude and colour of a million stars down to 10th magnitude
  • holy water sprinkler — morning star (def 2).
  • horizontal microcode — (processor)   Microcode using horizontal encoding.
  • horizontal scan rate — (hardware)   (HSR) The measure of how many scan lines of pixels a monitor can display in one second, expressed in kHz (generally somewhere between 20 and 100 kHz). The HSR is controlled by the horizontal sync signal generated by the video controller, but is limited by the speed with which the monitor can scan the electron beam horizontally across the screen and then return it to the beginning of the next line.
  • horizontally opposed — A horizontally opposed engine has the cylinders set horizontally at either side of the crankshaft.
  • houses of parliament — In Britain, the Houses of Parliament are the British parliament, which consists of two parts, the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The buildings where the British parliament does its work are also called the Houses of Parliament.
  • hydrodesulfurization — desulfurization by catalytic agents of the sulfur-rich hydrocarbons obtained from petroleum or the like during cracking or hydrocracking.
  • hyperbolic cotangent — a hyperbolic function that is the ratio of cosh to sinh, being the reciprocal of tanh; coth
  • hypercholesterolemia — the presence of an excessive amount of cholesterol in the blood.
  • hyperlipoproteinemia — Pathology. any of various disorders of lipoprotein metabolism, usually characterized by abnormally high levels of cholesterol and certain lipoproteins in the blood.
  • implicit parallelism — (parallel)   A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which decides automatically which parts to run in parallel. The best way of providing implicit parallelism is still (1995) an active research topic. The problem is to generate the right number of parallel tasks of the right size (or "granularity"). Too many tasks and the system gets bogged down in house-keeping, or memory for waiting tasks runs out, too few tasks and processors are left idle. The best performance is usually achieved with explicit parallelism where the programmer can annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks.
  • in flagrante delicto — Law. in the very act of committing the offense.
  • in the lap of luxury — If you say that someone lives in the lap of luxury, you mean that they live in conditions of great comfort and wealth.
  • incremental analysis — (testing)   Partial analysis of an incomplete product to allow early feedback on its development.
  • incremental recorder — a device for recording data as it is generated, usually on paper tape or magnetic tape, and feeding it into a computer
  • independent variable — Mathematics. a variable in a functional relation whose value determines the value or values of other variables, as x in the relation y = 3 x 2 . Compare dependent variable (def 1).
  • industrial democracy — control of an organization by the people who work for it, esp by workers holding positions on its board of directors
  • industrial espionage — the stealing of technological or commercial research data, blueprints, plans, etc., as by a person in the hire of a competing company.
  • industrial insurance — industrial life insurance.
  • industrial relations — (used with a plural verb) the dealings or relations of an industrial concern with its employees, with labor in general, with the public, etc.
  • inelastic scattering — a scattering of particles due to an inelastic collision that also changes their wavelengths and phases.
  • inertial upper stage — a U.S. two-stage, solid-propellant rocket used to boost a relatively heavy spacecraft from a low earth orbit into a planetary trajectory or an elliptical transfer orbit. Abbreviation: IUS.
Was this page helpful?
Yes No
Thank you for your feedback! Tell your friends about this page
Tell us why?