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22-letter words containing a, s, t, i

  • reverse discrimination — the unfair treatment of members of majority groups resulting from preferential policies, as in college admissions or employment, intended to remedy earlier discrimination against minorities.
  • rheumatoid spondylitis — ankylosing spondylitis.
  • rocky mountain oysters — mountain oyster.
  • round-table discussion — a discussion held at a meeting of parties or people on equal terms
  • rural district council — (in England and Wales from 1888 to 1974 and Northern Ireland from 1898 to 1973) a group of people elected to govern a rural division of a county
  • saddleback caterpillar — a moth larva, Sibine stimulea, of the southeastern U.S, having a brown and green, saddlelike marking on its back and poisonous spines.
  • safety integrity level — A safety integrity level is a relative level of risk reduction.
  • safety-critical system — A computer, electronic or electromechanical system whose failure may cause injury or death to human beings. E.g. an aircraft or nuclear power station control system. Common tools used in the design of safety-critical systems are redundancy and formal methods. See also aeroplane rule.
  • sail close to the wind — air in natural motion, as that moving horizontally at any velocity along the earth's surface: A gentle wind blew through the valley. High winds were forecast.
  • saint george's channel — a channel between Wales and Ireland, connecting the Irish Sea and the Atlantic. 100 miles (160 km) long; 50–90 miles (81–145 km) wide.
  • sainte anne de beaupre — a village in S Quebec, Canada, on the St. Lawrence River: shrine and basilica.
  • sainte-anne-de-beaupré — village in S Quebec, Canada, on the St. Lawrence: site of a Rom. Catholic shrine (established 1658): pop. 3,000
  • sales force automation — (business)   (Sales Automation, SFA, SFFA, Sales & Field Force Automation) Software to support sales reps. The software gives sales representitives access to contacts, appointments and e-mail. It is likely to be integrated with Customer Relationship Management systems and Opportunity Management Systems.
  • salt-marsh caterpillar — the fuzzy larva of a moth, Estigmene acrea, of North America, destructive to various crops.
  • santa cruz de tenerife — a seaport on NE Tenerife island, in the W Canary Islands.
  • santiago de compostela — a city in and the capital of Chile, in the central part.
  • sapir-whorf hypothesis — a theory developed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf that states that the structure of a language determines or greatly influences the modes of thought and behavior characteristic of the culture in which it is spoken.
  • sarcoplasmic reticulum — a system of membrane-bound tubules that surrounds muscle fibrils, releasing calcium ions during contraction and absorbing them during relaxation.
  • satellite broadcasting — the transmission of television or radio programmes from an artificial satellite at a power suitable for direct reception in the home
  • satisfiability problem — A problem used as an example in complexity theory. It can be stated thus: Given a Boolean expression E, decide if there is some assignment to the variables in E such that E is true. A Boolean expression is composed of Boolean variables, (logical) negation (NOT), (logical) conjunction (AND) and parentheses for grouping. The satisfiability problem was the first problem to be proved to be NP-complete (by Cook).
  • saturday night special — a cheap, small-caliber handgun that is easily obtainable and concealable.
  • saturday-night special — a cheap, small-caliber handgun that is easily obtainable and concealable.
  • save the children fund — a development agency which raises money for deprived children around the world
  • sb can whistle for sth — If you say that someone can whistle for a particular thing, you mean that you are not willing or able to give it to them.
  • scalable sampling rate — (compression, standard, algorithm)   (SSR) See, e.g., MPEG-4 AAC SSR.
  • schachter's hypothesis — (web)   The observation that "Given two unrelated technical terms, an Internet search engine will retrieve only résumés". This was first formulated by Joshua Eli Schachter in about 1998, while poring over the uniformly irrelevant pages that resulted from a search he'd run on "+Perl +MAPI" in Altavista.
  • school crossing patrol — the official name for lollipop man or lady
  • scientific creationism — the belief that the account of creation in the early chapters of Genesis is scientifically as well as religiously valid and that it can be supported by scientific evidence apart from scriptural authority.
  • scissors-and-paste job — if you describe a piece of work as a scissors and paste job, you mean that it has been mechanically compiled, as if by simply cutting and pasting different parts to make a new whole
  • search the fucking web — (web, jargon)   (Always abbreviated STFW) A response implying that an inquirer could have easily found an answer to his question using Google or some other web search engine. It is now often quicker and more productive to search the World-Wide Web than to RTFM.
  • second consonant shift — the consonant shift by which High German became differentiated from other Germanic languages.
  • second vatican council — the twenty-first Roman Catholic ecumenical council (1962–65) convened by Pope John XXIII. Its 16 documents redefined the nature of the church, gave bishops greater influence in church affairs, and increased lay participation in liturgy.
  • secondary articulation — coarticulation (def 2).
  • secondary-articulation — concomitance of articulation, as in fro, ostensibly a succession of three discrete sounds but physically a single articulation (f-) blending into a coarticulation (-fr-), which blends into an articulation (-r-), which blends into a coarticulation (-ro-), which blends into an articulation (-o).
  • see the light (of day) — to come into existence
  • selective transmission — a transmission in which the available forward and reverse gears may be engaged in any order, without passing progressively through the different changes of gear.
  • self-sustaining growth — economic growth that maintains itself without intervention
  • semipalmated sandpiper — a common North American sandpiper, Calidris pusillus, having semipalmate feet.
  • senior master sergeant — a noncommissioned officer ranking above a master sergeant and below a chief master sergeant. Abbreviation: SMSgt.
  • serial presence detect — presence detect
  • set one's face against — impudence; boldness: to have the face to ask such a rude question.
  • seventh-day adventists — See example at Seventh-Day.
  • shaken but not stirred — If you say that someone has been shaken but not stirred by an experience, you mean that they have been slightly disturbed or emotionally affected by it, but not deeply enough to change their behaviour or way of thinking.
  • show the white feather — a symbol of cowardice.
  • side-impact protection — a device that is intended to protect a car and its passengers in the event of a collision at the side
  • simple harmonic motion — vibratory motion in a system in which the restoring force is proportional to the displacement from equilibrium. Abbreviation: S.H.M., s.h.m.
  • simultaneous broadcast — a programme, etc, broadcast simultaneously on radio and television
  • simultaneous equations — a set of two or more equations, each containing two or more variables whose values can simultaneously satisfy both or all the equations in the set, the number of variables being equal to or less than the number of equations in the set.
  • single virtual storage — OS/VS2
  • sir william blackstone — Sir William, 1723–80, English jurist and writer on law.
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