17-letter words containing a, p, l, e, d
- diphenylhydantoin — a white, slightly water-soluble powder, C 15 H 11 N 2 O 2 , used in the form of its sodium salt to prevent or arrest convulsions in epilepsy.
- dipped headlights — road vehicle headlights which have been switched from the main to the lower beam
- disaster planning — disaster recovery
- dispensationalism — the interpreting of history as a series of divine dispensations.
- displacement hull — a hull that displaces a significant volume of water when under way.
- disposable income — the part of a person's income remaining after deducting personal income taxes.
- disrespectability — Lack of respectability.
- doorstep salesman — a door-to-door salesman
- double pair royal — a set of four cards of the same denomination, worth 12 points.
- drive up the wall — to cause to become crazy or furious
- 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.
- dynamically typed — dynamic typing
- enlarged prostate — disorder of male reproductive gland
- epicycloidal gear — a gear of an epicyclic train
- epidemiologically — With regard to epidemiology.
- esprit d'escalier — clever repartee one thinks of too late
- eupen and malmédy — a region of Belgium in Liège province: ceded by Germany in 1919. Pop: 29 372 (2004 est)
- 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.
- exceptional child — a gifted child
- exemplary damages — law: fine imposed as a deterrent
- feint-ruled paper — writing paper with light horizontal lines printed across at regular intervals
- fiddleback spider — brown recluse spider.
- foucault pendulum — a pendulum that demonstrates the rotation of the earth by exhibiting an apparent change in its plane of oscillation.
- fourfold purchase — a tackle that is composed of a rope passed through two fourfold blocks in such a way as to provide mechanical power in the ratio of 1 to 5 or 1 to 4, depending on whether hauling is done on the running or the standing block and without considering friction. Compare tackle (def 2).
- garden heliotrope — the common valerian, Valeriana officinalis, especially when cultivated as an ornamental.
- grey-faced petrel — a dark-coloured New Zealand petrel, Pterodroma macroptera gouldi
- guadalupe hidalgo — a city in the Federal District of Mexico: famous shrine; peace treaty 1848.
- half-breadth plan — a diagrammatic plan of one half of the hull of a vessel divided lengthwise amidships, showing water lines, stations, diagonals, and bow and buttock lines.
- hardware platform — a group of compatible computers that can run the same software.
- holding operation — a plan or procedure devised to prolong the existing situation
- hydrotherapy pool — a pool of water used for hydrotherapy
- illegal procedure — a penalty assessed against the offensive team for a technical rules violation, as in assuming an illegal formation.
- incandescent lamp — a lamp that emits light due to the glowing of a heated material, especially the common device in which a tungsten filament enclosed within an evacuated glass bulb is rendered luminous by the passage of an electric current through it.
- indecipherability — Quality of being indecipherable.
- independence hall — the building in Philadelphia where the Declaration of Independence was signed.
- indispensableness — The characteristic of being indispensable; indispensability.
- interdepartmental — involving or existing between two or more departments: interdepartmental rivalry.
- interdisciplinary — combining or involving two or more academic disciplines or fields of study: The economics and history departments are offering an interdisciplinary seminar on Asia.
- interrupt handler — (software) A routine which is executed when an interrupt occurs. Interrupt handlers typically deal with low-level events in the hardware of a computer system such as a character arriving at a serial port or a tick of a real-time clock. Special care is required when writing an interrupt handler to ensure that either the interrupt which triggered the handler's execution is masked out (inhibitted) until the handler exits, or the handler is re-entrant so that multiple concurrent invocations will not interfere with each other. If interrupts are masked then the handler must execute as quickly as possible so that important events are not missed. This is often arranged by splitting the processing associated with the event into "upper" and "lower" halves. The lower part is the interrupt handler which masks out further interrupts as required, checks that the appropriate event has occurred (this may be necessary if several events share the same interrupt), services the interrupt, e.g. by reading a character from a UART and writing it to a queue, and re-enabling interrupts. The upper half executes as part of a user process. It waits until the interrupt handler has run. Normally the operating system is responsible for reactivating a process which is waiting for some low-level event. It detects this by a shared flag or by inspecting a shared queue or by some other synchronisation mechanism. It is important that the upper and lower halves do not interfere if an interrupt occurs during the execution of upper half code. This is usually ensured by disabling interrupts during critical sections of code such as removing a character from a queue.
- intradepartmental — Within a department.
- jurisprudentially — In terms of jurisprudence.
- kaleidoscopically — of, relating to, or created by a kaleidoscope.
- kidney transplant — surgery to replace a kidney
- lambda expression — (mathematics) A term in the lambda-calculus denoting an unnamed function (a "lambda abstraction"), a variable or a constant. The pure lambda-calculus has only functions and no constants.
- lan kanal adapter — (networking) (LKA) A sort of external LAN interface for a BS200 computer.
- landscape painter — artist who depicts natural scenery
- landscaped garden — a garden that has been artistically designed
- lares and penates — household gods
- least fixed point — (mathematics) A function f may have many fixed points (x such that f x = x). For example, any value is a fixed point of the identity function, (\ x . x). If f is recursive, we can represent it as f = fix F where F is some higher-order function and fix F = F (fix F). The standard denotational semantics of f is then given by the least fixed point of F. This is the least upper bound of the infinite sequence (the ascending Kleene chain) obtained by repeatedly applying F to the totally undefined value, bottom. I.e. fix F = LUB {bottom, F bottom, F (F bottom), ...}. The least fixed point is guaranteed to exist for a continuous function over a cpo.