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24-letter words containing a, n, s, e, r

  • open shortest-path first — Open Shortest-Path First Interior Gateway Protocol
  • open software foundation — (body)   (OSF) A foundation created by nine computer vendors, (Apollo, DEC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Bull, Nixdorf, Philips, Siemens and Hitachi) to promote "Open Computing". It is planned that common operating systems and interfaces, based on developments of Unix and the X Window System will be forthcoming for a wide range of different hardware architectures. OSF announced the release of the industry's first open operating system - OSF/1 on 23 October 1990.
  • open system architecture — (operating system)   (OSA) A competitor to IBM's SNA.
  • operational requirements — (programming)   Qualitative and quantitative parameters that specify the desired capabilities of a system and serve as a basis for determining the operational effectiveness and suitability of a system prior to deployment.
  • optical signal processor — optical computing
  • organization and methods — a systematic examination of an organization's structure, procedures, management and control, with a view to determining its comparative efficiency in achieving defined organizational aims
  • other things being equal — If you say 'other things being equal' or 'all things being equal' when talking about a possible situation, you mean if nothing unexpected happens or if there are no other factors which affect the situation.
  • parallel cousin marriage — marriage between the children of two brothers or two sisters.
  • passive balance of trade — a negative balance of trade
  • people's liberation army — See under Huk (def 1).
  • photomechanical transfer — a method of producing photographic prints or offset printing plates from paper negatives by a chemical transfer process rather than by exposure to light
  • plantation walking horse — one of a breed of saddle horses developed largely from Standardbred and Morgan stock.
  • port address translation — (networking)   (PAT) A function provided by some routers which allows hosts on a LAN to communicate with the rest of a network (such as the Internet) without revealing their own private IP address. All outbound packets have their IP address translated to the routers external IP address. Replies come back to the router which then translates them back into the private IP address of the original host for final delivery. Compare SOCKS.
  • potassium cobaltinitrite — a yellow, crystalline, slightly water-soluble powder, K 3 Co(NO 2) 6 , used as a pigment in oil and watercolor paints, and for coloring surfaces of glass, porcelain, etc.
  • prairie button snakeroot — a stout composite plant, Liatris pycnostachya, of prairies in the central U.S., having showy, rose-purple flower heads in dense spikes.
  • pre-emptive multitasking — (operating system, parallel)   A type of multitasking where the scheduler can interrupt and suspend ("swap out") the currently running task in order to start or continue running ("swap in") another task. The tasks under pre-emptive multitasking can be written as though they were the only task and the scheduler decides when to swap them. The scheduler must ensure that when swapping tasks, sufficient state is saved and restored that tasks do not interfere. The length of time for which a process runs is known as its "time slice" and may depend on the task's priority or its use of resources such as memory and I/O. This contrasts with cooperative multitasking where each task must include calls to allow it to be descheduled periodically.
  • preparatory to doing sth — If one action is done preparatory to another, it is done before the other action, usually as preparation for it.
  • present company excepted — If you are making a general, unfavourable comment about a particular type of person, and you are with people of that type, you can say 'present company excepted' as a way of making your comment sound more polite.
  • pretty amazing new stuff — (humour, communications)   (PANS) What PSTN is evolving into.
  • private health insurance — insurance against the need for medical treatment as a private patient
  • professional association — a body of persons engaged in the same profession, formed usually to control entry into the profession, maintain standards, and represent the profession in discussions with other bodies
  • professional corporation — a corporation formed by one or more licensed practitioners, especially medical or legal, to operate their practices on a corporate plan. Abbreviation: PC, P.C.
  • professional programming — paranoid programming
  • progressive assimilation — assimilation in which a preceding sound has an effect on a following one, as in shortening captain to cap'm rather than cap'n.
  • progressive conservative — a member of the Progressive Conservative party of Canada.
  • psychopathic personality — an antisocial personality characterized by the failure to develop any sense of moral responsibility and the capability of performing violent or antisocial acts
  • public relations officer — a person who is responsible for communications with the public
  • put the show on the road — to set things in operation; start an activity, venture, etc.
  • quick-assembly furniture — furniture such as shelves and cupboards which you buy as a number of separate pieces and assemble yourself
  • rain on someone's parade — to hinder someone's enjoyment; upset someone's plans
  • rapid eye movement sleep — REM sleep.
  • read someone like a book — to understand a person, or his motives, character, etc, thoroughly and clearly
  • recharge one's batteries — If you recharge a battery, you put an electrical charge back into the battery by connecting it to a machine that draws power from another source of electricity.
  • reciprocal translocation — an exchange of segments between two nonhomologous chromosomes.
  • reconnaissance satellite — a military satellite designed to carry out photographic surveillance, gather electronic intelligence, detect nuclear explosions, or provide early warning of strategic-missile launchings.
  • recursive descent parser — (grammar)   A "top-down" parser built from a set of mutually-recursive procedures or a non-recursive equivalent where each such procedure usually implements one of the productions of the grammar. Thus the structure of the resulting program closely mirrors that of the grammar it recognises.
  • referential transparency — (programming)   An expression E is referentially transparent if any subexpression and its value (the result of evaluating it) can be interchanged without changing the value of E. This is not the case if the value of an expression depends on global state which can change value. The most common example of changing global state is assignment to a global variable. For example, if y is a global variable in: f(x) { return x+y; } g(z) { a = f(1); y = y + z; return a + f(1); } function g has the "side-effect" that it alters the value of y. Since f's result depends on y, the two calls to f(1) will return different results even though the argument is the same. Thus f is not referentially transparent. Changing the order of evaluation of the statements in g will change its result. We could make f above referentially transparent by passing in y as an argument: f(x, y) = x+y Similarly, g would need to take y as an argument and return its new value as part of the result: g(z, y) { a = f(1, y); y' = y+z; return (a + f(1, y'), y'); } Referentially transparent programs are more amenable to formal methods and easier to reason about because the meaning of an expression depends only on the meaning of its subexpressions and not on the order of evaluation or side-effects of other expressions. We can stretch the concept of referential transparency to include input and output if we consider the whole program to be a function from its input to its output. The program as a whole is referentially transparent because it will always produce the same output when given the same input. This is stretching the concept because the program's input may include what the user types, the content of certain files or even the time of day. If we do not consider global state like the contents of files as input, then writing to a file and reading what was written behaves just like assignment to a global variable. However, if we must consider the state of the universe as an input rather than global state then any deterministic system would be referentially transparent! See also extensional equality, observational equivalence.
  • registered general nurse — (in Britain) a nurse who has completed a three-year training course in all aspects of nursing care to enable him or her to be registered with the United Kingdom Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery, and Health Visiting
  • renewable term insurance — Renewable term insurance is term life insurance that may be renewed for another period without the policyholder needing to provide further evidence of their insurability.
  • repetitive strain injury — overuse strain injury
  • repondez s'il vous plait — Répondez s'il vous plait
  • representative democracy — a person or thing that represents another or others.
  • resale price maintenance — the practice by which a manufacturer establishes a fixed or minimum price for the resale of a brand product by retailers or other distributors
  • research and development — the part of a commercial company's activity concerned with applying the results of scientific research to develop new products and improve existing ones
  • responsibility allowance — payment made to somebody who has special responsibilities
  • reverse annuity mortgage — a type of home mortgage under which an elderly homeowner is allowed a long-term loan in the form of monthly payments against his or her paid-off equity as collateral, repayable when the home is eventually sold. Abbreviation: RAM.
  • revised standard version — a revision of the Bible, based on the American Standard Version and the King James Version, prepared by American scholars, published in its completed form in 1952. Abbreviation: RSV.
  • robot exclusion standard — standard for robot exclusion
  • rock back on one's heels — to astonish or be astonished
  • rocky mountain whitefish — mountain whitefish.
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