21-letter words containing a, l, e, f
- contextual definition — definition of a word or symbol by explaining the meaning of the phrase or statement in which it occurs.
- continental breakfast — A continental breakfast is breakfast that consists of food such as bread, butter, jam, and a hot drink. There is no cooked food.
- conway's game of life — (simulation) The first popular cellular automata based artificial life simulation. Life was invented by British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970 and was first introduced publicly in "Scientific American" later that year. Conway first devised what he called "The Game of Life" and "ran" it using plates placed on floor tiles in his house. Because of he ran out of floor space and kept stepping on the plates, he later moved to doing it on paper or on a checkerboard and then moved to running Life as a computer program on a PDP-7. That first implementation of Life as a computer program was written by M. J. T. Guy and S. R. Bourne (the author of Unix's Bourne shell). Life uses a rectangular grid of binary (live or dead) cells each of which is updated at each step according to the previous state of its eight neighbours as follows: a live cell with less than two, or more than three, live neighbours dies. A dead cell with exactly three neighbours becomes alive. Other cells do not change. While the rules are fairly simple, the patterns that can arise are of a complexity resembling that of organic systems -- hence the name "Life". Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with Life, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented Life in TECO!; see Gosperism). When a hacker mentions "life", he is more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, the 1950s-era board game or the human state of existence.
- correctional facility — A correctional facility is a prison or similar institution.
- cosmological redshift — the part of the redshift of celestial objects resulting from the expansion of the universe.
- cost-benefit analysis — an analysis that takes into account the costs of a project and its benefits to society, as well as the revenue it generates
- court of common pleas — (formerly) a superior court exercising jurisdiction in civil actions between private citizens
- credit life insurance — insurance guaranteeing payment of the unpaid portion of a loan if the debtor should die.
- dark-field microscope — ultramicroscope
- dataflow architecture — a means of arranging computer data processing in which operations are governed by the data present and the processing it requires rather than by a prewritten program that awaits data to be processed
- 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.
- 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.
- dumfries and galloway — a region in S Scotland. 2460 sq. mi. (6371 sq. km).
- 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
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- franco-belgian system — French system.
- fraudulent conversion — conversion committed with the intent to defraud
- frederick william iii — 1770–1840, king of Prussia 1797–1840.
- free alongside vessel — (of a shipment of goods) delivered to the dock without charge to the buyer, but excluding the cost of loading onto the vessel
- free-floating anxiety — chronic anxiety occurring for no identifiable cause
- friuli-venezia giulia — a region in NE Italy: formerly part of Venezia Giulia, most of which was ceded to Yugoslavia (now Croatia and Slovenia) in 1947. 2947 sq. mi. (7630 sq. km).
- full faith and credit — the obligation under Article IV of the U.S. Constitution for each state to recognize the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.
- functional dependency — (database) Given a relation R (in a relational database), attribute Y of R is functionally dependent on attribute X of R and X of R functionally determines Y of R (in symbols R.X -> R.Y) if and only if each X in R has associated with it precisely one Y in R (at any one time). Attributes X and Y may be composite. This is very close to a function in the mathematical sense.