20-letter words containing c, o, g, r
- fission-track dating — the dating of samples of minerals by comparing the tracks in them by fission fragments of the uranium nuclei they contain, before and after irradiation by neutrons
- flight data recorder — a recording device that records relevant data during an aircraft's flight
- floodlight projector — a powerful lamp having a reflector curved to produce a floodlight.
- florence nightingale — Florence ("the Lady with the Lamp") 1820–1910, English nurse: reformer of hospital conditions and procedures; reorganizer of nurse's training programs.
- four-colour glossies — 1. Literature created by marketroids that allegedly contains technical specs but which is in fact as superficial as possible without being totally content-free. "Forget the four-colour glossies, give me the tech ref manuals." Often applied as an indication of superficiality even when the material is printed on ordinary paper in black and white. Four-colour-glossy manuals are *never* useful for finding a problem. 2. [rare] Applied by extension to manual pages that don't contain enough information to diagnose why the program doesn't produce the expected or desired output.
- fractionating column — a long vertical cylinder used in fractional distillation, in which internal reflux enables separation of high and low boiling fractions to take place
- front-to-back engine — an engine in which the crankshaft is arranged front to back along the axis of the vehicle
- frosting on the cake — a sweet mixture, cooked or uncooked, for coating or filling cakes, cookies, and the like; icing.
- garcilaso de la vega — 1503?–36, Spanish poet.
- general practitioner — a medical practitioner whose practice is not limited to any specific branch of medicine or class of diseases. Abbreviation: G.P.
- get a real computer! — (jargon) A typical hacker response to news that somebody is having trouble getting work done on a toy system or bitty box. The threshold for "real computer" rises with time. As of mid-1993 it meant multi-tasking, with a hard disk, and an address space bigger than 16 megabytes. At this time, according to GLS, computers with character-only displays were verging on "unreal". In 2001, a real computer has a one gigahertz processor, 128 MB of RAM, 20 GB of hard disk, and runs Linux.
- glyceryl monoacetate — acetin.
- go like the clappers — to move extremely fast
- good driver discount — A good driver discount is a discount on insurance that is available to drivers who have no at-fault accidents and no traffic offenses during a particular period.
- good neighbor policy — a diplomatic policy of the U.S., first presented in 1933 by President Franklin Roosevelt, for the encouragement of friendly relations and mutual defense among the nations of the Western Hemisphere.
- gorno-altai republic — a constituent republic of S Russia: mountainous, rising over 4350 m (14 500 ft) in the Altai Mountains of the south. Capital: Gorno-Altaisk. Pop: 202 900 (2002). Area: 92 600 sq km (35 740 sq miles)
- grade school teacher — a teacher in a grade school
- graphics accelerator — (graphics, hardware) Hardware (often an extra circuit board) to perform tasks such as plotting lines and surfaces in two or three dimensions, filling, shading and hidden line removal.
- greek-letter society — any student fraternity or sorority in a US university or college, usually using Greek letters in their title
- greenwich hour angle — hour angle measured from the meridian of Greenwich, England.
- grey-crowned babbler — an insect-eating Australian bird, Pomatostomus temporalis of the family Timaliidae
- group code recording — (storage) (GCR) A recording method used for 6250 BPI magnetic tapes. GCR typically uses a group of five bits of code to represent four bits of data. The encoding ensures no more than two or three zeros occur in a row, and no more than eight or so ones occur in a row, where zeros represent an absense of magnetic change. GCR is also used on Commodore Business Machines diskette drives; the 4040, 8050, 154x, 157x and 158x series of 5.25" and 3.5" low and high density diskette drives used with 8-bit home computers circa 1977 to 1992. It was also supported on Amiga internal and external drives but only used for reading non-Amiga disks. Compare NRZI, PE.
- group life insurance — a form of life insurance available to members of a group, typically employees of a company, under a master policy.
- guarded horn clauses — (language) (GHC) A parallel dialect of Prolog by K. Ueda in which each clause has a guard. GHC is similar to Parlog. When several clauses match a goal, their guards are evaluated in parallel and the first clause whose guard is found to be true is used and others are rejected. It uses committed-choice nondeterminism. See also FGHC, KL1.
- harmonic progression — a series of numbers the reciprocals of which are in arithmetic progression.
- helicopter parenting — a style of child rearing in which an overprotective mother or father discourages a child's independence by being too involved in the child's life: In typical helicopter parenting, a mother or father swoops in at any sign of challenge or discomfort.
- hierarchical routing — The complex problem of routing on large networks can be simplified by breaking a network into a hierarchy of smaller networks, where each level is responsible for its own routing. The Internet has, basically, three levels: the backbones, the mid-levels, and the stub networks. The backbones know how to route between the mid-levels, the mid-levels know how to route between the sites, and each site (being an autonomous system) knows how to route internally. See also Exterior Gateway Protocol, Interior Gateway Protocol, transit network.
- hieroglyphic hittite — an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of Indo-European, written in a pictographic script in Syria c1200–c600 b.c.: the same language as written in cuneiform in Anatolia is known as Luwian.
- historical sociology — the sociological study of the origins and development of societies and of other social phenomena that seeks underlying laws and principles.
- human genome project — a federally funded U.S. scientific project to identify both the genes and the entire sequence of DNA base pairs that make up the human genome.
- hyperbolic cotangent — a hyperbolic function that is the ratio of cosh to sinh, being the reciprocal of tanh; coth
- in flagrante delicto — Law. in the very act of committing the offense.
- industrial sociology — the sociological study of social relationships and social structures in business settings.
- information exchange — discussion that involves exchanging ideas and knowledge
- integrity constraint — (database) A constraint (rule) that must remain true for a database to preserve data integrity. Integrity constraints are specified at database creation time and enforced by the database management system. Examples from a genealogical database would be that every individual must be their parent's child or that they can have no more than two natural parents.
- intelligence officer — a military officer responsible for collecting and processing data on hostile forces, weather, and terrain.
- international gothic — a style of Gothic art, especially painting, developed in Europe in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, chiefly characterized by details carefully delineated in a naturalistic manner, elongated and delicately modeled forms, the use of complex perspective, and an emphasis on the decorative or ornamental aspect of drapery, foliage, or setting.
- into/in cold storage — If you put an idea or plan into cold storage or in cold storage, you delay it for a while rather than acting on it as you originally intended.
- job control language — a language used to construct statements that identify a particular job to be run and specify the job's requirements to the operating system under which it will run. Abbreviation: JCL.
- judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
- knock-down, drag-out — characterized by great violence, harshness, animosity, etc.
- labour-saving device — a machine, gadget, etc, that reduces (human) effort, hard work or labour
- lacto-ovo-vegetarian — Also called lactovarian [lak-tuh-vair-ee-uh n] /ˌlæk təˈvɛər i ən/ (Show IPA), ovolactarian, ovo-lacto-vegetarian. a vegetarian whose diet includes dairy products and eggs.
- languedoc-roussillon — a region of S France, on the Gulf of Lions: consists of the departments of Lozère, Gard, Hérault, Aude, and Pyrénées-Orientales; mainly mountainous with a coastal plain
- light the touchpaper — to do something that will cause much anger or excitement
- light-weight process — (operating system, parallel) (LWP) A single-threaded sub-process which, unlike a thread, has its own process identifier and may also differ in its inheritance and controlling features. Several operating systems, e.g. SunOS 5.x, provide system calls for creating and controlling LWPs.
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- logarithmic function — a function defined by y = log bx, especially when the base, b, is equal to e, the base of natural logarithms.
- logical construction — anything referred to by an incomplete symbol capable of contextual definition.
- logical link control — (networking) (LLC) The upper portion of the data link layer, as defined in IEEE 802.2. The LLC sublayer presents a uniform interface to the user of the data link service, usually the network layer. Beneath the LLC sublayer is the Media Access Control (MAC) sublayer.