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17-letter words containing d, e, n, m

  • economic blockade — an embargo on trade with a country, esp one which prohibits receipt of exports from that country, with the intention of disrupting the country's economy
  • emergency landing — an occasion when a place is forced to land: for example, because of a mechanical fault, bad weather, terrorism, etc.
  • emissions trading — the buying and selling of allowances for pollutant emissions
  • employee discount — When the employees of a store or other retail business are entitled to an employee discount, they do not have to pay the full price for goods they buy in the store.
  • enforcement order — an order by a court to force a person or organization to comply with a regulation or law
  • enzyme deficiency — failure of the body to produce a specific enzy
  • error of judgment — a wrong or bad decision
  • ethernet meltdown — A network meltdown on Ethernet.
  • eupen and malmédy — a region of Belgium in Liège province: ceded by Germany in 1919. Pop: 29 372 (2004 est)
  • examination board — an organization that sets and corrects exams
  • export department — the department of a business concerned with the export of the business's goods or services
  • fifth commandment — “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee”: fifth of the Ten Commandments.
  • fine-toothed comb — a comb with fine, closely set teeth
  • firehose syndrome — (networking, jargon)   An absence, failure or inadequacy of flow control mechanisms causing the sender to overwhelm the receiver. The implication is that, like trying to drink from a firehose, the consequenses are worse than just loss of data, e.g. the receiver may crash. See ping-flood.
  • first commandment — “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”: first of the Ten Commandments.
  • forensic medicine — the application of medical knowledge to questions of civil and criminal law, especially in court proceedings.
  • foucault pendulum — a pendulum that demonstrates the rotation of the earth by exhibiting an apparent change in its plane of oscillation.
  • fractal dimension — (mathematics)   A common type of fractal dimension is the Hausdorff-Besicovich Dimension, but there are several different ways of computing fractal dimension. Fractal dimension can be calculated by taking the limit of the quotient of the log change in object size and the log change in measurement scale, as the measurement scale approaches zero. The differences come in what is exactly meant by "object size" and what is meant by "measurement scale" and how to get an average number out of many different parts of a geometrical object. Fractal dimensions quantify the static *geometry* of an object. For example, consider a straight line. Now blow up the line by a factor of two. The line is now twice as long as before. Log 2 / Log 2 = 1, corresponding to dimension 1. Consider a square. Now blow up the square by a factor of two. The square is now 4 times as large as before (i.e. 4 original squares can be placed on the original square). Log 4 / log 2 = 2, corresponding to dimension 2 for the square. Consider a snowflake curve formed by repeatedly replacing ___ with _/\_, where each of the 4 new lines is 1/3 the length of the old line. Blowing up the snowflake curve by a factor of 3 results in a snowflake curve 4 times as large (one of the old snowflake curves can be placed on each of the 4 segments _/\_). Log 4 / log 3 = 1.261... Since the dimension 1.261 is larger than the dimension 1 of the lines making up the curve, the snowflake curve is a fractal. [sci.fractals FAQ].
  • frames per second — (unit)   (fps) The unit of measurement of the frame rate of a moving image.
  • freedmen's bureau — an agency of the War Department set up in 1865 to assist freed slaves in obtaining relief, land, jobs, fair treatment, and education.
  • french somaliland — a former name of Djibouti (def 1).
  • front-end payment — a payment required or incurred in advance of a project in order to get it under way
  • full-motion video — (video)   (FMV) Any kind of video that is theoretically capable of changing the entire content on the screen fast enough that the transitions are not obvious to the human eye, i.e. about 24 times a second or more. In practise most video encoding relies on the fact that in most video there is relatively little change from one frame to the next. This allows for compression of the video data. The term is used, chiefly in computer games, in contrast to techniques such as the use of sprites that move against a more-or-less fixed background.
  • game as ned kelly — extremely brave; indomitable
  • garden apartments — a complex of low apartment buildings surrounded by lawn or landscaped areas
  • garden mignonette — a Mediterranean plant, Resida odorata, which has spikes of small greenish-white flowers with prominent anthers
  • general admission — an admission charge for unreserved seats at a theatrical performance, sports event, etc.
  • giovanni demedici — Catherine de', Catherine de Médicis.
  • gomez de la serna — Ramón [rah-mawn] /rɑˈmɔn/ (Show IPA), ("Ramón") 1888–1963, Spanish novelist, dramatist, biographer, and critic.
  • grand climacteric — Physiology. a period of decrease of reproductive capacity in men and women, culminating, in women, in the menopause.
  • grandmother clock — a pendulum clock similar to a grandfather's clock but shorter.
  • great namaqualand — an arid coastal region in the S part of Namibia, extending into the Cape of Good Hope province of the Republic of South Africa, divided by the Orange River into two regions, one in Namibia (Great Namaqualand) the other in South Africa (Little Namaqualand) inhabited by the Nama.
  • great-grandmother — a grandmother of one's father or mother.
  • green book cd-rom — A standard CD-ROM format developed by Philips for CD-i. It is ISO 9660 compliant and uses mode 2 form 2 addressing. It can only be played on drives which are XA (Extended Architecture) compatible. Many Green Book discs contain CD-i applications which can only be played on a CD-i player but many others contain films or music videos. Video CDs in Green Book format are normally labelled "Digital Video on CD" Green Book was obsoleted by White book CD-ROM in March 1994.
  • grid merchandiser — A grid merchandiser is a lightweight, free-standing, flexible fixture made up of moveable grids of wire and used by retailers can display large volumes of merchandise in a small space.
  • gridiron pendulum — a clock pendulum having, as part of its shaft, an arrangement of brass and steel rods having different coefficients of expansion, such that the pendulum has the same length at any temperature.
  • guanine deaminase — an enzyme, found in liver, brain, spleen, pancreas, and kidney, that converts guanine into xanthine and ammonia.
  • guardian ad litem — a person appointed by a court as guardian of an infant or other person to act on his or her behalf in a particular action or proceeding.
  • gulf war syndrome — a group of symptoms occurring in some Gulf War veterans, most commonly including headache and memory loss, muscle pain, skin disorders, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and gastrointestinal and respiratory ailments, possibly caused by exposure to chemical weapons, vaccines, infectious diseases, or other factors.
  • hammer and sickle — the emblem of the Soviet Union, adopted in 1923 and consisting of an insignia of a hammer with its handle across the blade of a sickle and a star above.
  • helen keller mode — 1. State of a hardware or software system that is deaf, dumb, and blind, i.e. accepting no input and generating no output, usually due to an infinite loop or some other excursion into deep space. (Unfair to the real Helen Keller, whose success at learning speech was triumphant.) See also go flatline, catatonic. 2. On IBM PCs under MS-DOS, refers to a specific failure mode in which a screen saver has kicked in over an ill-behaved application which bypasses the very interrupts the screen saver watches for activity. Your choices are to try to get from the program's current state through a successful save-and-exit without being able to see what you're doing, or to re-boot the machine. This isn't (strictly speaking) a crash.
  • hoare powerdomain — powerdomain
  • holistic medicine — incorporating the concept of holism, or the idea that the whole is more than merely the sum of its parts, in theory or practice: holistic psychology.
  • homeland security — national defence
  • homogentisic acid — an intermediate compound in the metabolism of tyrosine and of phenylalanine, found in excess in the blood and urine of persons affected with alkaptonuria.
  • household ammonia — diluted ammonia, often having a small quantity of detergent, used in the home for cleaning.
  • hurler's syndrome — a medical condition characterized by physical deformity and mental deficiency
  • hydrothermal vent — an opening on the floor of the sea from which hot, mineral-rich solutions issue. Compare vent1 (def 2).
  • hydroxytryptamine — (organic compound) Any hydroxy derivative of tryptamine, but especially 5-hydroxytryptamine (serotonin).
  • hypodermic needle — a hollow needle used to inject solutions subcutaneously.
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