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17-letter words containing a, l, d, r

  • discrete variable — a variable that may assume only a countable, and usually finite, number of values.
  • dishonourableness — Alternative spelling of dishonorableness.
  • display standards — display standard
  • disproportionally — not in proportion; disproportionate.
  • disrespectability — Lack of respectability.
  • dissipation trail — a clear rift left behind an aircraft flying through a thin cloud layer.
  • dissolve in tears — weep
  • distance learning — education in which students receive instruction over the Internet, from a video, etc., instead of going to school.
  • distillers' grain — a by-product of the distillation process for making whisky, used as an animal foodstuff
  • division of labor — a production process in which a worker or group of workers is assigned a specialized task in order to increase efficiency.
  • dollar a year man — of or being an official or employee, especially a federal appointee, who receives a token annual salary, usually of one dollar: a dollar-a-year man.
  • dollars-and-cents — considered strictly in terms of money: from a dollars-and-cents viewpoint.
  • doorstep salesman — a door-to-door salesman
  • double pair royal — a set of four cards of the same denomination, worth 12 points.
  • double quatrefoil — a charge having the form of a foil with eight leaves, used especially as the cadency mark of a ninth son.
  • double refraction — the separation of a ray of light into two unequally refracted, plane-polarized rays of orthogonal polarizations, occurring in crystals in which the velocity of light rays is not the same in all directions.
  • double track line — a railway line with double track
  • douglas engelbart — (person)   Douglas C. Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse. On 1968-12-09, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, USA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the on live system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse, hypertext, object addressing, dynamic file linking and shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface. The original 90-minute video: Hyperlinks, Mouse, Web-board.
  • douglas macarthur — Douglas, 1880–1964, U.S. general: supreme commander of allied forces in SW Pacific during World War II and of UN forces in Korea 1950–51.
  • downward mobility — movement from one social level to a higher one (upward mobility) or a lower one (downward mobility) as by changing jobs or marrying.
  • downwardly mobile — See under vertical mobility (def 1).
  • downwardly-mobile — See under vertical mobility (def 1).
  • drained of colour — colourless
  • drilling platform — a structure, either fixed to the sea bed or mobile, which supports the machinery and equipment (the drilling rig), together with the stores, required for digging an offshore oil well
  • drink like a fish — any of various cold-blooded, aquatic vertebrates, having gills, commonly fins, and typically an elongated body covered with scales.
  • drive to the wall — to force into an awkward situation
  • drive up the wall — to cause to become crazy or furious
  • drive-by download — an incidence of an unwanted program being automatically downloaded to a computer, often without the user's knowledge
  • drool-proof paper — (jargon)   Documentation that has been obsessively dumbed down, to the point where only a cretin could bear to read it, is said to have succumbed to the "drool-proof paper syndrome" or to have been "written on drool-proof paper". For example, this is an actual quote from Apple Computer's LaserWriter manual: "Do not expose your LaserWriter to open fire or flame."
  • duality principle — the principle that a mathematical duality exists under certain conditions.
  • due course of law — the regular administration of the law, according to which no citizen may be denied his or her legal rights and all laws must conform to fundamental, accepted legal principles, as the right of the accused to confront his or her accusers.
  • dull as dishwater — water in which dishes are, or have been, washed.
  • dwarf huckleberry — tangleberry.
  • dynamics analyzer — (language)   (DYANA) An early language specialised for vibrational and other dynamic physical systems.
  • early closing day — a day on which most shops in a town or area close after lunch
  • edward fitzgerald — Edward, 1809–83, English poet: translator of drama and poetry, especially of Omar Khayyám.
  • electric retarder — An electric retarder is an electromagnetic transmission brake that is only effective when a vehicle is moving.
  • electricity board — a company which supplies electricity
  • electrocardiogram — A record or display of a person’s heartbeat produced by electrocardiography.
  • emergency landing — an occasion when a place is forced to land: for example, because of a mechanical fault, bad weather, terrorism, etc.
  • enlarged prostate — disorder of male reproductive gland
  • epicycloidal gear — a gear of an epicyclic train
  • esprit d'escalier — clever repartee one thinks of too late
  • ethinyloestradiol — Alternative form of ethinylestradiol.
  • exception handler — Special code which is called when an exception occurs during the execution of a program. If the programmer does not provide a handler for a given exception, a built-in system exception handler will usually be called resulting in abortion of the program run and some kind of error indication being returned to the user. Examples of exception handler mechanisms are Unix's signal calls and Lisp's catch and throw.
  • exemplary damages — law: fine imposed as a deterrent
  • falkland islander — a person from the Falkland Islands
  • fall on deaf ears — the organ of hearing and equilibrium in vertebrates, in humans consisting of an external ear that gathers sound vibrations, a middle ear in which the vibrations resonate against the tympanic membrane, and a fluid-filled internal ear that maintains balance and that conducts the tympanic vibrations to the auditory nerve, which transmits them as impulses to the brain.
  • false bread-fruit — ceriman.
  • fear and loathing — (Hunter S. Thompson) A state inspired by the prospect of dealing with certain real-world systems and standards that are totally brain-damaged but ubiquitous - Intel 8086s, COBOL, EBCDIC, or any IBM machine except the Rios (also known as the RS/6000).
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