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22-letter words containing a, p, i, n

  • fixed point combinator — (mathematics)   (Y) The name used in combinatory logic for the fixed point function, also written as "fix".
  • flocculent precipitate — a woolly-looking precipitate, as aluminum hydroxide formed by the addition of ammonia to an aluminum-salt solution.
  • forced place insurance — Forced place insurance is insurance taken out by a bank or creditor on an uninsured debtor's behalf on a property that is being used as collateral.
  • functional programming — (programming)   (FP) A program in a functional language consists of a set of (possibly recursive) function definitions and an expression whose value is output as the program's result. Functional languages are one kind of declarative language. They are mostly based on the typed lambda-calculus with constants. There are no side-effects to expression evaluation so an expression, e.g. a function applied to certain arguments, will always evaluate to the same value (if its evaluation terminates). Furthermore, an expression can always be replaced by its value without changing the overall result (referential transparency). The order of evaluation of subexpressions is determined by the language's evaluation strategy. In a strict (call-by-value) language this will specify that arguments are evaluated before applying a function whereas in a non-strict (call-by-name) language arguments are passed unevaluated. Programs written in a functional language are generally compact and elegant, but have tended, until recently, to run slowly and require a lot of memory. Examples of purely functional languages are Clean, FP, Haskell, Hope, Joy, LML, Miranda, and SML. Many other languages such as Lisp have a subset which is purely functional but also contain non-functional constructs. See also lazy evaluation, reduction.
  • galvanic skin response — a change in the electrical conductivity of the skin caused by an emotional reaction to a stimulus.
  • garmisch-partenkirchen — a city in S Germany, in the Bavarian Alps.
  • general public licence — (spelling)   It's spelled "General Public License". (In the UK, "licence" is a noun and "license" is a verb (like "advice"/"advise") but in the US both are spelled "license").
  • general public license — (legal)   (GPL, note US spelling) The licence applied to most software from the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project and other authors who choose to use it. The licences for most software are designed to prevent users from sharing or changing it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee the freedom to share and change free software - to make sure the software is free for all its users. The GPL is designed to make sure that anyone can distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if they wish); that they receive source code or can get it if they want; that they can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that they know they can do these things. The GPL forbids anyone to deny others these rights or to ask them to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for those who distribute copies of the software or modify it. See also General Public Virus.
  • geographic determinism — a doctrine that regards geographical conditions as the determining or molding agency of group life.
  • give a person what for — to punish or reprimand a person severely
  • government corporation — a corporation set up by a national government to carry out business transactions on its behalf
  • graph rewriting system — An extension of a term rewriting system which uses graph reduction on terms represented by directed graphs to avoid duplication of work by sharing expressions.
  • graphical display unit — an output device incorporating a cathode ray tube on which both line drawings and text can be displayed. It is usually used in conjunction with a light pen to input or reposition data
  • gravitational collapse — the final stage of stellar evolution in which a star collapses to a final state, as a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole, when the star's nuclear reactions no longer generate enough pressure to balance the attractive force of gravity.
  • gross national product — the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced in a country during one year. Abbreviation: GNP.
  • guanosine triphosphate — GTP.
  • help a person off with — to assist a person in the removal of (clothes)
  • hepatitis non-a, non-b — a disease of the liver that is clinically indistinguishable from hepatitis B but is caused by a retrovirus or retroviruslike agent.
  • home improvement grant — a government grant for house improvements such as insulation, adding a bathroom, or urgent repairs
  • horizontal application — An application program common to different business processes, e.g. office automation. Compare vertical application.
  • horn-rimmed spectacles — spectacles with rims made of material resembling horn
  • hospital administrator — a person who works in the management team of a hospital
  • ice-making compartment — a part of a refrigerator in which ice is made
  • immigration department — the government department responsible for laws regarding immigrants and immigration
  • imperative programming — imperative language
  • in anticipation of sth — If something is done in anticipation of an event, it is done because people believe that event is going to happen.
  • in the lap of the gods — If you say that a situation is in the lap of the gods, you mean that its success or failure depends entirely on luck or on things that are outside your control.
  • incremental repetition — repetition, with variation, of a refrain or other part of a poem, especially a ballad.
  • independent assortment — law of independent assortment.
  • independent contractor — self-employed or freelance worker
  • information processing — processing of information, especially the handling of information by computers in accordance with strictly defined systems of procedure.
  • initial program loader — (operating system)   (IPL) A bootstrap loader which loads the part of an operating system needed to load the remainder of the operating system.
  • intermetallic compound — a compound of two or more metals.
  • interoperable database — A database front-end which communicates with multiple heterogenous databases and makes them appear as a single homogenous entity with semantic calls. See ODBC.
  • interpretive semantics — a school of semantic theory based on the doctrine that the rules that relate sentences to their meanings form an autonomous system, separate from the rules that determine what is grammatical in a language
  • interrogator-responsor — a radio or radar transceiver for sending a signal to a transponder and receiving and interpreting the reply.
  • isthmus of tehuantepec — the narrowest part of S Mexico, with the Bay of Campeche on the north coast and the Gulf of Tehuantepec (an inlet of the Pacific) on the south coast
  • jackpot winning ticket — a ticket that contains all the winning numbers in a lottery etc, allowing the owner of the ticket to claim the jackpot prize
  • japanese umbrella pine — a single aberrant species of pine, Sciadopitys verticillata, in which the leaves are fused in pairs and the crown is spire-shaped
  • java community process — (project)   (JCP) An organization controlled by Sun Microsystems to further the growth of the Java language and runtime. The JCP produces standards called Java Standard Requests, which are "requests" in the same sense as RFCs.
  • keep a person guessing — to let a person remain in a state of uncertainty
  • landscape architecture — the art of arranging or modifying the features of a landscape, an urban area, etc., for aesthetic or practical reasons.
  • last call optimisation — (programming)   (Or "tail call optimisation") Discarding the immediate calling context (call stack frame) when the last action of a function or procedure, A, is to call another function or procedure, B. B will then return directly to A's caller, or possibly further up the call stack if the optimisation has been applied to several consecutive calls. Last call optimisation allows arbitrarily deep nesting of procedure calls without consuming memory to store useless environments. This is particularly useful in the special case of tail recursion optimisation, where a procedure's last action is to call itself (possibly indirectly).
  • le chatelier principle — the law that if a constraint is applied to a system in equilibrium, the system adjusts to a new equilibrium that tends to counteract the constraint.
  • left-handed compliment — an ambiguous compliment
  • lesser prairie chicken — either of two North American gallinaceous birds of western prairies, Tympanuchus cupido (greater prairie chicken) or T. pallidicinctus (lesser prairie chicken) having rufous, brown, black, and white plumage.
  • lethargic encephalitis — sleeping sickness (def 2).
  • little st bernard pass — a pass over the Savoy Alps, between Bourg-Saint-Maurice, France, and La Thuile, Italy: 11th-century hospice. Height: 2187 m (7177 ft)
  • love-hate relationship — If you have a love-hate relationship with someone or something, your feelings towards them change suddenly and often from love to hate.
  • magnetic dipole moment — a measure of the magnetic strength of a magnet or current-carrying coil, expressed as the torque per unit magnetic-flux density produced when the magnet or coil is set with its axis perpendicular to the magnetic field
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