27-letter words containing a, v, i, r
- tonguing-and-grooving plane — a plane for cutting the edges of boards into tongues and grooves.
- united service organization — a private, non-profit organization that provides morale and recreational services to members of the US military, with programmes in 140 centres worldwide
- universal computer protocol — (communications, protocol) An earlier form of External Machine Interface (EMI).
- universal military training — a program for maintaining a nation's pool of trained military personnel, requiring all qualified citizens to serve for a period of active and reserve duty. Abbreviation: UMT.
- universal naming convention — (networking) (UNC) The type of file system path used in Microsoft Windows networking to completely specify a directory on a file server. The basic format is: \\servername\sharename where "servername" is the hostname or IP address of a network file server, and "sharename" is the name of a shared directory on the server. This is related to the conventional MS-DOS "C:\windows" style of directory name. E.g. \\server1\dave might be set up to point to C:\users\homedirs\dave on a server called "server1". It is possible to execute a program using this convention without having to specifically link a drive, by running: \\server\share\directory\program.exe The undocumented DOS command, TRUENAME can be used to find out the UNC name of a file or directory on a network drive. Even Microsoft don't know whether UNC stands for "Universal Naming Convention" or "Uniform Naming Convention", both appear on their website, sometimes withing the same document, but with a preference for "Universal".
- university grants committee — an advisory committee of the British government, which advised on the distribution of grant funding amongst British universities. It was in existence from 1919 until 1989. Its functions have now largely been taken over by the higher education funding councils (HEFCE (England), SHEFC (Scotland), HEFCW (Wales), and the Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland)
- vice-presidential candidate — a candidate for the position of a person who ranks immediately below the chief executive or head of state of a republic, esp of the US
- virtual machine environment — (operating system) (VME) ICL's mainframe operating system.