21-letter words containing c, i, e, n, f
- confirm a reservation — If you confirm a reservation, you inform someone who has booked a room at a hotel that the reservation is definite.
- conspiracy of silence — If there is a conspiracy of silence about something, people who know about it have agreed that they will not talk publicly about it, although it would probably be a good thing if people in general knew about it.
- contextual definition — definition of a word or symbol by explaining the meaning of the phrase or statement in which it occurs.
- continental breakfast — A continental breakfast is breakfast that consists of food such as bread, butter, jam, and a hot drink. There is no cooked food.
- conway's game of life — (simulation) The first popular cellular automata based artificial life simulation. Life was invented by British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970 and was first introduced publicly in "Scientific American" later that year. Conway first devised what he called "The Game of Life" and "ran" it using plates placed on floor tiles in his house. Because of he ran out of floor space and kept stepping on the plates, he later moved to doing it on paper or on a checkerboard and then moved to running Life as a computer program on a PDP-7. That first implementation of Life as a computer program was written by M. J. T. Guy and S. R. Bourne (the author of Unix's Bourne shell). Life uses a rectangular grid of binary (live or dead) cells each of which is updated at each step according to the previous state of its eight neighbours as follows: a live cell with less than two, or more than three, live neighbours dies. A dead cell with exactly three neighbours becomes alive. Other cells do not change. While the rules are fairly simple, the patterns that can arise are of a complexity resembling that of organic systems -- hence the name "Life". Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with Life, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented Life in TECO!; see Gosperism). When a hacker mentions "life", he is more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, the 1950s-era board game or the human state of existence.
- correctional facility — A correctional facility is a prison or similar institution.
- cost-benefit analysis — an analysis that takes into account the costs of a project and its benefits to society, as well as the revenue it generates
- counsel of perfection — excellent but unrealizable advice
- count of monte cristo — a novel (1844–45) by Alexandre Dumas père.
- credit life insurance — insurance guaranteeing payment of the unpaid portion of a loan if the debtor should die.
- customer satisfaction — When customers are pleased with the goods or services they have bought, you can refer to customer satisfaction.
- department of justice — the department of the U.S. federal government charged with the responsibility for the enforcement of federal laws. Abbreviation: DOJ.
- detoxification centre — a place that specializes in the treatment of alcoholism or drug addiction
- dictionary definition — the meaning of a word as given in a dictionary or dictionaries
- difference of opinion — disagreement
- differential calculus — the branch of mathematics that deals with differentials and derivatives.
- diffusion coefficient — the rate at which a diffusing substance is transported between opposite faces of a unit cube of a system when there is unit concentration difference between them
- drop the handkerchief — a children's game in which all the players but one stand in a circle facing inward, while that one player stealthily drops a handkerchief behind a player in the circle who must pursue and attempt to catch the one who dropped the handkerchief before the latter reaches the vacated place.
- dwarf japanese quince — a low, shrubby, Japanese flowering quince, Chaenomeles japonica, of the rose family, having salmon-to-orange flowers and yellow fruit.
- electric flux density — Electric flux density is electric flux passing through a unit area perpendicular to the direction of the flux.
- electromagnetic field — a field of force associated with a moving electric charge equivalent to an electric field and a magnetic field at right angles to each other and to the direction of propagation
- faculty board meeting — a meeting of the governing body of a faculty
- file allocation table — (file system) (FAT) The component of an MS-DOS or Windows 95 file system which describes the files, directories, and free space on a hard disk or floppy disk. A disk is divided into partitions. Under the FAT file system each partition is divided into clusters, each of which can be one or more sectors, depending on the size of the partition. Each cluster is either allocated to a file or directory or it is free (unused). A directory lists the name, size, modification time and starting cluster of each file or subdirectory it contains. At the start of the partition is a table (the FAT) with one entry for each cluster. Each entry gives the number of the next cluster in the same file or a special value for "not allocated" or a special value for "this is the last cluster in the chain". The first few clusters after the FAT contain the root directory. The FAT file system was originally created for the CP/M[?] operating system where files were catalogued using 8-bit addressing. MS DOS's FAT allows only 8.3 filenames. With the introduction of MS-DOS 4 an incompatible 16-bit FAT (FAT16) with 32-kilobyte clusters was introduced that allowed partitions of up to 2 gigabytes. Microsoft later created FAT32 to support partitions larger than two gigabytes and pathnames greater that 256 characters. It also allows more efficient use of disk space since clusters are four kilobytes rather than 32 kilobytes. FAT32 was first available in OEM Service Release 2 of Windows 95 in 1996. It is not fully backward compatible with the 16-bit and 8-bit FATs. Compare: NTFS.
- financial times index — one of the indexes of share prices produced by the Financial Times, especially the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index
- financial underwriter — A financial underwriter is an insurance employee working in financial underwriting.
- flotation compartment — in a boat, an enclosed section filled with air or gas to give buoyancy
- food conversion ratio — a ratio expressing the weight of food required to produce a unit gain in the live weight of an animal
- foreground processing — a type of processing that supports interaction between interactive and batch operations
- foreign correspondent — a correspondent, as for a periodical, assigned to send back articles and news dispatches from a foreign country for publication.
- foreign exchange rate — the rate that specifies how much the currency of a nation is worth in terms of the currency of another nation
- forensic anthropology — the branch of physical anthropology in which anthropological data, criteria, and techniques are used to determine the sex, age, genetic population, or parentage of skeletal or biological materials in questions of civil or criminal law.
- fort lesley j. mcnair — a military reservation in SW Washington, D.C., on the Potomac River, SW of the Capitol.
- fractional extraction — Fractional extraction is a process of extracting a liquid from a liquid, in which two solutes are separated, with one leaving in the extract and one in the raffinate.
- framing specification — A specification of the "protocol bits" that surround the "data bits" on a communications channel to allow the data to be "framed" into chunks, like start and stop bits in EIA-232. It allows a receiver to synchronize at points along the data stream.
- franco-belgian system — French system.
- fraudulent conversion — conversion committed with the intent to defraud
- french and indian war — the war in America in which France and its Indian allies opposed England 1754–60: ended by Treaty of Paris in 1763.
- french foreign legion — a unit of the French Army formerly serving esp in French North African colonies. It is largely recruited from foreigners, with French senior officers
- french fried potatoes — a more formal name for chips
- fuel injection engine — and engine with a system for introducing atomized liquid fuel under pressure directly into the combustion chambers of an internal-combustion engine without the use of a carburettor
- full faith and credit — the obligation under Article IV of the U.S. Constitution for each state to recognize the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.
- functional dependency — (database) Given a relation R (in a relational database), attribute Y of R is functionally dependent on attribute X of R and X of R functionally determines Y of R (in symbols R.X -> R.Y) if and only if each X in R has associated with it precisely one Y in R (at any one time). Attributes X and Y may be composite. This is very close to a function in the mathematical sense.
- functional illiterate — a person with some basic education who still falls short of a minimum standard of literacy or whose reading and writing skills are inadequate to everyday needs.
- functional imperative — a requirement for the survival of any social system, as communication, control of conflict, or socialization.
- genetic amplification — an increase in the frequency of replication of a DNA segment.
- girlfriend experience — a service provided by a prostitute that includes more personal activity, such as kissing, than provided traditionally by sex workers
- grammatical inference — Deducing a grammar from given examples. Also known as "inductive inference" and recently as "computational learning".
- ground-effect machine — ACV (def 2).
- higher-order function — (HOF) A function that can take one or more functions as argument and/or return a function as its value. E.g. map in (map f l) which returns the list of results of applying function f to each of the elements of list l. See also curried function.
- highest common factor — greatest common divisor. Abbreviation: H.C.F.