24-letter words containing a, r, c, f, o
- second earl of shelburne — William Petty Fitzmaurice, 2nd Earl of, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, William Petty Fizmaurice Lansdowne.
- senegambia confederation — an economic and political union (1982–89) between Senegal and The Gambia
- serial interface adaptor — (SIA) The Ethernet driver chip used on a Filtabyte Ethernet card.
- shadow foreign secretary — the member of the main opposition party in Parliament who would hold the office of Foreign Secretary if their party were in power
- stratificational grammar — a grammar based upon the theory that language is made up of successive strata that are interconnected by established rules.
- structural functionalism — functionalism (def 3).
- telephony user interface — (communications) (TUI) Either a software interface to telephony (e.g. a phone-capable PC) or a DTMF-based interface to software (e.g. voicemail).
- telescope user interface — (hardware, interface) (TUI) A remote control interface for a telescope.
- the official secrets act — an act of Parliament that covers the protection of information relating to state security
- the red badge of courage — a novel (1895) by Stephen Crane.
- the wars of the diadochi — a series of conflicts between 321 and 281 bc, fought by six Macedonian generals who, after the death of Alexander the Great, desired control of his empire
- to break the back of sth — If you break the back of a task or problem, you do the most difficult part of what is necessary to complete the task or solve the problem.
- to change for the better — If something changes for the better, it improves.
- to have egg on your face — If someone has egg on their face or has egg all over their face, they have been made to look foolish.
- trading standards office — an office of the local authority department that deals with trading standards
- under-secretary of state — any of various high officials subordinate only to the minister in charge of a department
- uniform resource locater — Uniform Resource Locator
- uniform resource locator — (web) (URL, previously "Universal") A standard way of specifying the location of an object, typically a web page, on the Internet. Other types of object are described below. URLs are the form of address used on the World-Wide Web. They are used in HTML documents to specify the target of a hypertext link which is often another HTML document (possibly stored on another computer). Here are some example URLs: http://w3.org/default.html http://acme.co.uk:8080/images/map.gif http://foldoc.org/?Uniform+Resource+Locator http://w3.org/default.html#Introduction ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/mirrors/msdos/graphics/gifkit.zip ftp://spy:[email protected]/pub/topsecret/weapon.tgz mailto:[email protected] news:alt.hypertext telnet://dra.com The part before the first colon specifies the access scheme or protocol. Commonly implemented schemes include: ftp, http (web), gopher or WAIS. The "file" scheme should only be used to refer to a file on the same host. Other less commonly used schemes include news, telnet or mailto (e-mail). The part after the colon is interpreted according to the access scheme. In general, two slashes after the colon introduce a hostname (host:port is also valid, or for FTP user:[email protected] or [email protected]). The port number is usually omitted and defaults to the standard port for the scheme, e.g. port 80 for HTTP. For an HTTP or FTP URL the next part is a pathname which is usually related to the pathname of a file on the server. The file can contain any type of data but only certain types are interpreted directly by most browsers. These include HTML and images in gif or jpeg format. The file's type is given by a MIME type in the HTTP headers returned by the server, e.g. "text/html", "image/gif", and is usually also indicated by its filename extension. A file whose type is not recognised directly by the browser may be passed to an external "viewer" application, e.g. a sound player. The last (optional) part of the URL may be a query string preceded by "?" or a "fragment identifier" preceded by "#". The later indicates a particular position within the specified document. Only alphanumerics, reserved characters (:/?#"<>%+) used for their reserved purposes and "$", "-", "_", ".", "&", "+" are safe and may be transmitted unencoded. Other characters are encoded as a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits. Space may also be encoded as "+". Standard SGML "&
;" character entity encodings (e.g. "é") are also accepted when URLs are embedded in HTML. The terminating semicolon may be omitted if & is followed by a non-letter character. - united states of america — United States. Abbreviation: U.S.A., USA.
- ventricular fibrillation — Pathology. a cardiac arrhythmia characterized by rapid, chaotic electrical impulses to the ventricles, incomplete ventricular contractions, and resultant loss of pulse and blood pressure.
- virtual software factory — (programming, tool) (VSF) A product from Systematica which allows users to develop CASE tools appropriate to any software engineering methodology.
- water of crystallization — water of hydration, formerly thought necessary to crystallization: now usually regarded as affecting crystallization only as it forms new molecular combinations.
- which stands for nothing — (language) (WSFN) A beginner's language with emphasis on graphics produced by Atari in 1983 for Atari home computers. There is also Advanced WSFN.
- you can't be too careful — You can say 'You can't be too careful' as a way of advising someone to be careful, even when this seems unnecessary.