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24-letter words containing d, i, s, t, r

  • domestic-relations court — court of domestic relations.
  • ductal carcinoma in situ — a form of breast cancer originating in the breast itself rather than spreading from another site
  • east riding of yorkshire — a county of NE England, a historical division of Yorkshire on the North Sea and the Humber estuary: became part of Humberside in 1974; reinstated as an independent unitary authority in 1996, with a separate authority for Kingston upon Hull: chiefly agricultural and low-lying, with various industries in Hull. Administrative centre: Beverley. Pop (excluding Hull): 321 300 (2003 est). Area (excluding Hull): 748 sq km (675 sq miles)
  • effective sound pressure — the square root of the mean of the squares of the sound pressures of a sound wave, measured at a given point over a certain time interval.
  • endotracheal anaesthesia — a method of administering gaseous anaesthetics to animals through a tube inserted into the trachea
  • exponential distribution — a continuous single-parameter distribution used esp when making statements about the length of life of certain materials or waiting times between randomly occurring events. Its density function is p(x) = λe–λx for positive λ and nonnegative x, and it is a special case of the gamma distribution
  • failure-directed testing — (programming)   (Or "heuristics testing") Software testing based on the knowledge of the types of errors made in the past that are likely for the system under test.
  • federal reserve district — the district served by a certain Federal Reserve Bank.
  • federal trade commission — FTC.
  • finger-pointing syndrome — (programming)   All-too-frequent result of bugs, especially in new or experimental configurations. The hardware vendor points a finger at the software. The software vendor points a finger at the hardware. All the poor users get is the finger.
  • flue gas desulfurization — Flue gas desulfurization is the removal of pollutants containing sulfur from flue gas.
  • free software foundation — (body)   (FSF) An organisation devoted to the creation and dissemination of free software, i.e. software that is free from licensing fees or restrictions on use. The Foundation's main work is supporting the GNU project, started by Richard Stallman (RMS), partly to proselytise for his position that information is community property and all software source should be shared. The GNU project has developed the GNU Emacs editor and a C compiler, gcc, replacements for many Unix utilities and many other tools. A complete Unix-like operating system (HURD) is in the works (April 1994). Software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, which also provides a good summary of the Foundation's goals and principles. The Free Software Foundation raises most of its funds from distributing its software, although it is a charity rather than a company. Although the software is freely available (e.g. by FTP - see below) users are encouraged to support the work of the FSF by paying for their distribution service or by making donations. One of the slogans of the FSF is "Help stamp out software hoarding!" This remains controversial because authors want to own, assign and sell the results of their labour. However, many hackers who disagree with RMS have nevertheless cooperated to produce large amounts of high-quality software for free redistribution under the Free Software Foundation's imprimatur. See copyleft, General Public Virus, GNU archive site. Unofficial WWW pages: PDX, DeLorie. E-mail: <[email protected]>. Address: Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Telephone: +1 (617) 876 3296.
  • geographical determinism — the theory that human activity is determined by geographical conditions
  • get on the wrong side of — to come into disfavour with
  • get under someone's skin — to anger or irritate someone
  • give sb/sth a wide berth — If you give someone or something a wide berth, you avoid them because you think they are unpleasant or dangerous, or simply because you do not like them.
  • glycogen storage disease — any of several inherited disorders of glycogen metabolism that result in excess accumulation of glycogen in various organs of the body.
  • gottfried von strassburg — early 13th-century German poet; author of the incomplete epic Tristan and Isolde, the version of the legend that served as the basis of Wagner's opera
  • graduated pension scheme — (between 1961 and 1975) an earnings-related pension scheme which was based on the amount of an employee's National Insurance contributions
  • great saint bernard pass — St. Bernard, Great.
  • hairdressing appointment — an appointment to have your hair cut, styled, coloured, etc, at a hairdresser
  • have one's head straight — the upper part of the body in humans, joined to the trunk by the neck, containing the brain, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
  • high-density lipoprotein — a blood constituent involved in the transport of cholesterol and associated with a decreased risk of atherosclerosis and heart attack. Abbreviation: HDL .
  • ichthyophthirius-disease — ich.
  • industrial correspondent — a journalist who specializes in reporting the industrial news
  • intermediate-level waste — radioactive waste material, such as reactor and processing-plant components, that is solidified before being mixed with concrete and stored in steel drums in deep mines or beneath the seabed in concrete chambers
  • internal auditory meatus — the canal extending through the petrous portion of the temporal bone, through which the glossopharyngeal nerve, the facial nerve, and the auditory nerve and artery pass.
  • international morse code — a form of Morse code used in international radiotelegraphy.
  • internet access provider — (networking, company)   (IAP) A company or other origanisation which provides access to the Internet to businesses and/or consumers. An IAP purchases an Internet link from another company that has a direct link to the Internet and resells portions of that bandwidth to the general public. For example, an IAP may purchase a T1 link (1.544Mb/s) and resell that bandwidth in chunks consisting of ISDN (64Kb/s, 128Kb/s) and analog modems (14.4Kb/s, 28.8Kb/s). The IAP's customer base is likely to include both businesses and individuals. Individual customers usually connect to the IAP via a modem and telephone line to a (preferably local) point of presence. An IAP may also be an Internet Service Provider.
  • irritable bowel syndrome — any combination of common disturbances of the bowel, as diarrhea or constipation, occurring with abdominal pain, sometimes accompanied by psychological stress. Abbreviation: IBS.
  • iterated function system — (graphics)   (IFS) A class of fractals that yield natural-looking forms like ferns or snowflakes. Iterated Function Systems use a very easy transformation that is done recursively.
  • knowledge representation — The subfield of artificial intelligence concerned with designing and using systems for storing knowledge - facts and rules about some subject. A body of formally represented knowledge is based on a conceptualisation - an abstract view of the world that we wish to represent. In order to manipulate this knowledge we must specify how the abstract conceptualisation is represented as a concrete data structure. An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualisation.
  • knowledge sharing effort — (project)   An ARPA project developing techniques and methods for building large-scale knowledge bases which are sharable and reusable.
  • lady washington geranium — show geranium.
  • least common denominator — the smallest number that is a common denominator of a given set of fractions.
  • leave much to be desired — be inadequate
  • licensed practical nurse — a person who has graduated from an accredited school of nursing and has become licensed to provide basic nursing care under the supervision of a physician or registered nurse. Abbreviation: LPN.
  • medium-scale integration — MSI.
  • milkweed tortoise beetle — any of several turtle-shaped leaf beetles, as Chelymorpha cassidea (argus tortoise beetle or milkweed tortoise beetle) which resembles the ladybird beetle and feeds primarily on bindweed and milkweed.
  • network addressable unit — (networking)   (NAU) The SNA term for an addressable entity. Examples include PUs, LUs, and SSCPs.
  • northern mariana islands — a US commonwealth territory in the N Pacific, formerly part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (1947–87). Capital: Saipan island (Capitol Hill). Pop: 51 170 (2013 est). Area: 477 sq km (184 sq miles)
  • object-oriented analysis — (programming)   (OOA) The first phase of object-oriented design.
  • object-oriented database — (database)   (OODB) A system offering DBMS facilities in an object-oriented programming environment. Data is stored as objects and can be interpreted only using the methods specified by its class. The relationship between similar objects is preserved (inheritance) as are references between objects. Queries can be faster because joins are often not needed (as in a relational database). This is because an object can be retrieved directly without a search, by following its object id. The same programming language can be used for both data definition and data manipulation. The full power of the database programming language's type system can be used to model data structures and the relationship between the different data items. OODBs typically provide better support for versioning. An object can be viewed as the set of all its versions. Also, object versions can be treated as full fledged objects. OODBs also provide systematic support for triggers and constraints which are the basis of active databases. Most, if not all, object-oriented application programs that have database needs will benefit from using an OODB.
  • open software foundation — (body)   (OSF) A foundation created by nine computer vendors, (Apollo, DEC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Bull, Nixdorf, Philips, Siemens and Hitachi) to promote "Open Computing". It is planned that common operating systems and interfaces, based on developments of Unix and the X Window System will be forthcoming for a wide range of different hardware architectures. OSF announced the release of the industry's first open operating system - OSF/1 on 23 October 1990.
  • organization and methods — a systematic examination of an organization's structure, procedures, management and control, with a view to determining its comparative efficiency in achieving defined organizational aims
  • passive balance of trade — a negative balance of trade
  • port address translation — (networking)   (PAT) A function provided by some routers which allows hosts on a LAN to communicate with the rest of a network (such as the Internet) without revealing their own private IP address. All outbound packets have their IP address translated to the routers external IP address. Replies come back to the router which then translates them back into the private IP address of the original host for final delivery. Compare SOCKS.
  • preparatory to doing sth — If one action is done preparatory to another, it is done before the other action, usually as preparation for it.
  • probability distribution — a distribution of all possible values of a random variable together with an indication of their probabilities.
  • put one's house in order — a building in which people live; residence for human beings.
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