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21-letter words containing a, t, h, e, r

  • nightmare file system — Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher spl level). Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the entire network of machines is frozen - worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great misfeature). ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s. See also broadcast storm.
  • no less a person than — a person of no lower importance, rank, etc. than
  • no/nothing other than — You use nothing other than and no other than when you are going to mention a course of action, decision, or description and emphasize that it is the only one possible in the situation.
  • north atlantic treaty — the treaty (1949) signed by 12 countries, providing for the establishment of NATO.
  • north east new guinea — the NE part of the former Australian Territory of New Guinea; now part of Papua New Guinea.
  • north pacific current — a warm current flowing eastward across the Pacific Ocean.
  • northumberland strait — the part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence that separates Prince Edward Island from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in SE Canada. About 200 miles (320 km) long; 9–30 miles (15–48 km) wide.
  • not care a hang about — to not care the least bit about
  • not hold one's breath — If you say that you won't hold your breath, you mean that you do not expect something to happen even though someone has suggested that it might.
  • of time and the river — a novel (1935) by Thomas Wolfe.
  • old spanish practices — irregular practices among a group of workers to gain increased financial allowances, reduced working hours, etc
  • on o's best behaviour — If someone is on their best behaviour, they are trying very hard to behave well.
  • one foot in the grave — near to death
  • one thing and another — You can use the expression 'one thing and another' to suggest that there are several reasons for something or several items on a list, but you are not going to explain or mention them all.
  • ophthalmia neonatorum — inflammation of the eyes of a newborn child due to an infectious disease, as gonorrhea, contracted during birth from the infected mother.
  • orthogonal projection — a two-dimensional graphic representation of an object in which the projecting lines are at right angles to the plane of the projection. Also called orthogonal projection. Compare isometric (def 5).
  • orthogonal trajectory — the locus of a point whose path cuts each curve of a family of curves at right angles.
  • paper over the cracks — conceal flaws or problems
  • paper-white narcissus — a white-flowered variety of Narcissus tazetta, often forced for indoor bloom.
  • part of the furniture — If you describe someone or something as part of the furniture, you are suggesting that they have been somewhere such as their place of work for such a long time that it is hard to imagine that place without them.
  • pass the hat (around) — In British English, if you pass the hat around, you collect money from a group of people, for example in order to give someone a present. In American English, you just say pass the hat.
  • path coverage testing — (testing)   Testing a program by examining which lines of executable code are visited (as in code coverage testing) and also the ways of getting to each line of code and the subsequent sequence of execution. Path coverage testing is the most comprehensive type of testing that a test suite can provide. It can find more bugs, especially those that are caused by data coupling. However, path coverage is hard and usually only used for small and/or critical sections of code.
  • pathfinder prospectus — a prospectus regarding the flotation of a new company that contains only sufficient details to test the market reaction
  • pellitory-of-the-wall — an urticaceous plant, P. diffusa, of the S and W European genus Parietaria, which grows in crevices and has long narrow leaves and small pink flowers
  • phrase structure tree — Linguistics. a structural representation of a sentence in the form of an inverted tree, with each node of the tree labeled according to the phrasal constituent it represents.
  • phrase-structure rule — a rule that generates a sentence or other syntactic construction from words and phrases and identifies its constituent structure.
  • pipelined burst cache — Pipeline Burst Cache
  • polygenic inheritance — the heredity of complex characters that are determined by a large number of genes, each one usually having a relatively small effect.
  • populist shop steward — a shop steward who operates in a delegate role, putting the immediate interests of his members before union principles and policies
  • portrait photographer — a photographer who specializes in portraits
  • primary sex character — any of the body structures directly concerned in reproduction, as the testes, ovaries, and external genitalia.
  • profit-sharing scheme — a scheme employing profit-sharing; a system in which a portion of the net profit of a business is distributed to its employees, usually in proportion to their wages or their length of service
  • programmed cell death — a normal, genetically regulated process leading to the death of cells and triggered by the presence or absence of certain stimuli, as DNA damage.
  • promoter of the faith — devil's advocate (def 2).
  • propantheline bromide — a substance, C 2 3 H 3 0 BrNO 3 , used in the treatment of peptic ulcers.
  • protestant work ethic — work ethic.
  • pseudohermaphroditism — an individual having internal reproductive organs of one sex and external sexual characteristics resembling those of the other sex or being ambiguous in nature. Compare hermaphrodite (def 1).
  • psychopathic disorder — (in England, according to the Mental Health Act 1983) a persistent disorder or disability of mind which results in abnormally aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct on the part of the person concerned
  • psychopharmacotherapy — the use of psychoactive drugs in the symptomatic treatment or control of mental disorders or psychiatric disease.
  • public health service — the agency that is responsible for the health of the general public
  • pulse height analyser — a multichannel analyser that sorts pulses into selected amplitude ranges
  • pulse height analyzer — an instrument that records or counts an electrical pulse if its amplitude falls within specified limits: used in nuclear physics research for the determination of energy spectra of nuclear radiations
  • purchasing department — the group of staff within an organization that is responsible for buying goods or products
  • put in the hard yards — to make a great effort to achieve an end
  • put sb in their place — If you put someone in their place, you show them that they are less important or clever than they think they are.
  • ralph roister doister — a play (1553?) by Nicholas Udall: the earliest known English comedy.
  • rap over the knuckles — to reprimand
  • rayleigh distribution — (mathematics)   A curve that yields a good approximation to the actual labour curves on software projects.
  • reciprocal inhibition — the theory that the pairing of an anxiety-provoking stimulus with anxiety-reducing reactions will weaken the association between the stimulus and the anxiety.
  • reconnaissance flight — a flight made by an aircraft in order to obtain military information about a particular place
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