20-letter words containing a, t, n
- elephant in the room — an obvious truth deliberately ignored by all parties in a situation
- eleusinian mysteries — a mystical religious festival, held in September at Eleusis in classical times, in which initiates celebrated Persephone, Demeter, and Dionysus
- elizabeth of hungary — Saint. 1207–31, Hungarian princess who devoted herself to charity and asceticism. Feast day: Nov 17 and 19
- embryo vitrification — a method of in vitro fertilization in which the embryo is exposed to a vitreous solution and frozen before being thawed and implanted into the uterus
- employee association — an organization, other than a trade union, whose members comprise employees of a single employing organization. The aims of the association may be social, recreational, or professional
- enabling legislation — legislation conferring certain specified powers on a person or organization
- endorsement in blank — an endorsement on a bill of exchange, cheque, etc, naming no payee and thus making the endorsed sum payable to the bearer
- enterprise javabeans — (specification, business, programming) (EJB) A server-side component architecture for writing reusable business logic and portable enterprise applications. EJB is the basis of Sun's Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Enterprise JavaBean components are written entirely in Java and run on any EJB compliant server. They are operating system, platform, and middleware independent, preventing vendor lock-in. EJB servers provide system-level services (the "plumbing") such as transactions, security, threading, and persistence. The EJB architecture is inherently transactional, distributed, multi-tier, scalable, secure, and wire protocol neutral - any protocol can be used: IIOP, JRMP, HTTP, DCOM etc. EJB 1.1 requires RMI for communication with components. EJB 2.0 is expected to require support for RMI/IIOP. EJB applications can serve assorted clients: browsers, Java, ActiveX, CORBA etc. EJB can be used to wrap legacy systems. EJB 1.1 was released in December 1999. EJB 2.0 is in development. Sun claims broad industry adoption. 30 vendors are shipping server products implementing EJB. Supporting vendors include IBM, Fujitsu, Sybase, Borland, Oracle, and Symantec. An alternative is Microsoft's MTS (Microsoft Transaction Server).
- entertainment center — stereo: hifi
- entrance examination — admission test
- entry qualifications — the qualifications people wishing to enter an organization, university, etc, have to have
- environment variable — (programming, operating system) A variable that is bound in the current environment. When evaluating an expression in some environment, the evaluation of a variable consists of looking up its name in the environment and substituting its value. Most programming languages have some concept of an environment but in Unix shell scripts it has a specific meaning slightly different from other contexts. In shell scripts, environment variables are one kind of shell variable. They differ from local variables and command line arguments in that they are inheritted by a child process. Examples are the PATH variable that tells the shell the file system paths to search to find command executables and the TZ variable which contains the local time zone. The variable called "SHELL" specifies the type of shell being used. These variables are used by commands or shell scripts to discover things about the environment they are operating in. Environment variables can be changed or created by the user or a program. To see a list of environment variables type "setenv" at the csh or tcsh prompt or "set" at the sh, bash, jsh or ksh prompt. In other programming languages, e.g. functional programming languages, the environment is extended with new bindings when a function's parameters are bound to its actual arguments or when new variables are declared. In a block-structured procedural language, the environment usually consists of a linked list of activation records.
- environmental health — the issues dealt with by the Environmental Health Department of a local authority, such as prevention of the spread of communicable diseases, food safety and hygiene, control of infestation by insects or rodents, etc
- environmental impact — the impact on the environment created by an industry, service, plan, or project
- epidural anaesthesia — numbing injection in the spine
- epitaxial transistor — a transistor made by depositing a thin pure layer of semiconductor material (epitaxial layer) onto a crystalline support by epitaxy. The layer acts as one of the electrode regions, usually the collector
- equalization payment — a financial grant made by the federal government to a poorer province in order to facilitate a level of services equal to that of a richer province
- equilibrium constant — The equilibrium constant is the ratio between the amount of reactants and the amount of product for a particular chemical reaction, used to calculate chemical behavior.
- equivalence relation — (mathematics) A relation R on a set including elements a, b, c, which is reflexive (a R a), symmetric (a R b => b R a) and transitive (a R b R c => a R c). An equivalence relation defines an equivalence class. See also partial equivalence relation.
- equivalent air speed — the speed at sea level that would produce the same Pitot-static tube reading as that measured at altitude
- erythema infectiosum — a mild infectious disease of childhood, caused by a virus, characterized by fever and a red rash spreading from the cheeks to the limbs and trunk
- essential amino acid — an amino acid that cannot be synthesized in the body and is thus an essential component of the diet
- essential complexity — (programming) A measure of the "structuredness" of a program.
- essential fatty acid — any fatty acid required by the body in manufacturing prostaglandins, found in such foods as oily fish and nuts
- estrela mountain dog — a sturdy well-built dog of a Portuguese breed with a long thick coat and a thick tuft of hair round the neck, often used as a guard dog
- examining magistrate — (in some countries with inquisitorial legal systems) a judge who investigates cases and decides whether there is a case to answer in court
- exercise, left as an — Used to complete a proof in technical books when one doesn't mind a handwave, or to avoid one entirely. The complete phrase is: "The proof [or "the rest"] is left as an exercise for the reader." This comment *has* occasionally been attached to unsolved research problems by authors possessed of either an evil sense of humour or a vast faith in the capabilities of their audiences.
- existentialistically — In an existentialist manner.
- explication de texte — a close textual analysis of a literary work
- extensional equality — (Or extensionality). Functions, f and g are extensionally equal if and only if f x = g x for all x. where "=" means both expressions fail to terminate (under some given reduction strategy) or they both terminate with the same basic value. Two functions may be extensionally equal but not inter-convertible (neither is reducible to the other). E.g. \ x . x+x and \ x . 2*x. See also observational equivalence, referential transparency.
- external respiration — exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide across external or respiratory surfaces, as gills or lungs, in multicellular organisms
- factor in (or into) — to include as a factor
- factor of production — any instrument, agent, etc., employed in the production of goods and services.
- fair-trade agreement — an agreement or contract between a manufacturer and a retailer to sell a branded or trademarked product at no less than a specific price: legally prohibited after 1975.
- feast of tabernacles — Sukkoth.
- feather in one's cap — one of the horny structures forming the principal covering of birds, consisting typically of a hard, tubular portion attached to the body and tapering into a thinner, stemlike portion bearing a series of slender, barbed processes that interlock to form a flat structure on each side.
- federal constitution — Constitution of the United States.
- federal reserve note — a form of paper money issued by a Federal Reserve Bank.
- federation of malaya — a federation of the nine Malay States of the Malay Peninsula and two of the Straits Settlements (Malacca and Penang): formed in 1948: became part of the British Commonwealth in 1957 and joined Malaysia in 1963
- fermentation alcohol — alcohol (def 1).
- fermentation-alcohol — Also called ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol, ethanol, fermentation alcohol. a colorless, limpid, volatile, flammable, water-miscible liquid, C 2 H 5 OH, having an etherlike odor and pungent, burning taste, the intoxicating principle of fermented liquors, produced by yeast fermentation of certain carbohydrates, as grains, molasses, starch, or sugar, or obtained synthetically by hydration of ethylene or as a by-product of certain hydrocarbon syntheses: used chiefly as a solvent in the extraction of specific substances, in beverages, medicines, organic synthesis, lotions, tonics, colognes, rubbing compounds, as an automobile radiator antifreeze, and as a rocket fuel. Compare denatured alcohol, methyl alcohol.
- fight tooth and nail — fight fiercely
- financial accounting — the work of preparing financial statements showing the financial performance of an organization for the benefit of people outside the organization and not involved in its day-to-day operation
- financial consultant — A financial consultant is the same as a financial adviser.
- financial controller — a senior executive in usually commercial organization who is in charge of financial affairs and oversees such things as the preparation of budgets and accounts
- financial instrument — A financial instrument is a document or contract that can be traded in a market, that represents an asset to one party and a liability or equity to the other.
- financial management — supervision and handling of the financial affairs of an organization
- financial statements — Financial statements are all of the reports that show how a company is performing for a certain period.
- finite state grammar — a simplified form of transformational grammar devised by Noam Chomsky
- finite state machine — (mathematics, algorithm, theory) (FSM or "Finite State Automaton", "transducer") An abstract machine consisting of a set of states (including the initial state), a set of input events, a set of output events, and a state transition function. The function takes the current state and an input event and returns the new set of output events and the next state. Some states may be designated as "terminal states". The state machine can also be viewed as a function which maps an ordered sequence of input events into a corresponding sequence of (sets of) output events. A deterministic FSM (DFA) is one where the next state is uniquely determinied by a single input event. The next state of a nondeterministic FSM (NFA) depends not only on the current input event, but also on an arbitrary number of subsequent input events. Until these subsequent events occur it is not possible to determine which state the machine is in. It is possible to automatically translate any nondeterministic FSM into a deterministic one which will produce the same output given the same input. Each state in the DFA represents the set of states the NFA might be in at a given time. In a probabilistic FSM [proper name?], there is a predetermined probability of each next state given the current state and input (compare Markov chain). The terms "acceptor" and "transducer" are used particularly in language theory where automata are often considered as abstract machines capable of recognising a language (certain sequences of input events). An acceptor has a single Boolean output and accepts or rejects the input sequence by outputting true or false respectively, whereas a transducer translates the input into a sequence of output events. FSMs are used in computability theory and in some practical applications such as regular expressions and digital logic design. See also state transition diagram, Turing Machine.