20-letter words containing c, s, r
- ecclesiastical court — a church court in ecclesiastical matters, presided over by members of the clergy and usually having no compulsory jurisdiction.
- economic determinism — the doctrine that all social, cultural, political, and intellectual forms are determined by or result from such economic factors as the quality of natural resources, productive capability, technological development, or the distribution of wealth.
- economic rationalism — an economic policy based on the efficiency of market forces, characterized by minimal government intervention, tax cuts, privatization, and deregulation of labour markets
- edward the confessor — Saint, 1002?–66, English king 1042–66: founder of Westminster Abbey.
- effective resistance — the resistance to an alternating current, expressed as the ratio of the power dissipated to the square of the effective current.
- electoral boundaries — the way that a country or area is divided for the purposes of voting in an election
- electrohydrodynamics — (physics) the study of the dynamics of electrically conducting fluid.
- electromotive series — a series of the metals, together with hydrogen, ranged in the order of their electrode potentials
- electronic signature — electronic proof of a person's identity
- electrophysiological — Of or pertaining to electrophysiology.
- electroshock therapy — a form of shock therapy in which electric current is applied to the brain
- entry qualifications — the qualifications people wishing to enter an organization, university, etc, have to have
- 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.
- 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
- european social fund — one of the four Structural Funds of the European Union which aims to support employment and the economic and social well-being of EU member countries
- exclusive or circuit — a computer logic circuit having two or more input wires and one output wire and giving a high-voltage output signal if a low-voltage signal is fed to one or more, but not all, of the input wires
- 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.
- explicit parallelism — A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which allows or forces the programmer to annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks. This is obviously more work for the programmer than a system with implicit parallelism (where the system decides automatically which parts to run in parallel) but may allow higher performance.
- fast-breeder reactor — a breeder reactor in which there is no moderator and fission is caused by high-energy neutrons.
- 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.
- field ion microscope — a device in which the atomic structure of the surface of a conductor is made visible by introducing helium gas into the device and applying a high voltage to ionize and accelerate the gas toward a fluorescent screen.
- field-ion microscope — a device in which the atomic structure of the surface of a conductor is made visible by introducing helium gas into the device and applying a high voltage to ionize and accelerate the gas toward a fluorescent screen.
- file descriptor leak — (programming) (Or "fd leak" /F D leek/) A kind of programming bug analogous to a core leak, in which a program fails to close file descriptors ("fd"s) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually runs out of them. See leak.
- 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.
- firearms certificate — a certificate that entitles the holder to own and keep a firearm
- first earl of cromer — 1st Earl of, Evelyn Baring.
- first-cause argument — an argument for the existence of God, asserting the necessity of an uncaused cause of all subsequent series of causes, on the assumption that an infinite regress is impossible.
- 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
- flame-fusion process — Verneuil process.
- for sb's consumption — If you do or say something for a particular person's or group's consumption, you do or say it especially for them, although your private thoughts or plans may be very different.
- for sb's delectation — If you do something for someone's delectation, you do it to give them enjoyment or pleasure.
- force someone's hand — to force someone to act
- force-field analysis — a decision-making technique, often presented graphically, that identifies all the positive and negative forces impinging on a problem
- 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.
- frame check sequence — (communications) (FCS) The extra characters added to a frame for error detection and correction(?). FCS is used in X.25, HDLC, Frame Relay, and other data link layer protocols.
- frederick barbarossa — ("Frederick Barbarossa") 1123?–90, king of Germany 1152–90; king of Italy 1152–90: emperor of the Holy Roman Empire 1152–90.
- frosting on the cake — a sweet mixture, cooked or uncooked, for coating or filling cakes, cookies, and the like; icing.
- fuming sulfuric acid — an oily, hygroscopic, corrosive liquid, H 2 S 2 O 7 , that, depending on purity, is colorless or dark brown: used chiefly as a dehydrating agent in the manufacture of explosives and as a sulfating or sulfonating agent in the manufacture of dyes.
- fundamental research — research carried out to deepen understanding of the fundamental or basic principles of something
- garcilaso de la vega — 1503?–36, Spanish poet.
- general public virus — (software, legal) A pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or application programs incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same terms as GNU code. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft "infects" software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code.
- generative semantics — a theory of generative grammar holding that the deep structure of a sentence is equivalent to its semantic representation, from which the surface structure can then be derived using only one set of rules that relate underlying meaning and surface form rather than separate sets of semantic and syntactic rules.
- 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.
- 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.
- gravimetric analysis — analysis by weight.
- great-circle sailing — sailing between two points more or less according to an arc of a great circle, in practice almost always using a series of rhumb lines of different bearings to approximate the arc, whose own bearing changes constantly unless it coincides with a meridian or the equator.