15-letter words containing d, o, w, s
- spawning ground — a place where fish deposit their eggs for fertilization
- spotted cowbane — a North American water hemlock, Cicuta maculata, of the parsley family, having a purple-mottled stem, white flowers, and deadly poisonous, tuberlike roots.
- spread the word — make others aware
- stand in awe of — to respect and fear
- straightforward — going or directed straight ahead: a straightforward gaze.
- sunflower seeds — the seeds of a sunflower, which can be eaten
- sweep the board — (in gambling) to win all the cards or money
- swiss army code — (programming, humour) Code for an application that is suffering from feature creep. Swiss Army Code does many things, but does none of them well.
- sword swallower — performer who puts swords in throat
- sword-swallower — a performer who simulates the swallowing of swords
- synod of whitby — the synod held in 664 at Whitby at which the Roman date for Easter was accepted and the Church in England became aligned with Rome
- take one's word — a unit of language, consisting of one or more spoken sounds or their written representation, that functions as a principal carrier of meaning. Words are composed of one or more morphemes and are either the smallest units susceptible of independent use or consist of two or three such units combined under certain linking conditions, as with the loss of primary accent that distinguishes black·bird· from black· bird·. Words are usually separated by spaces in writing, and are distinguished phonologically, as by accent, in many languages.
- the devil's own — a very difficult or problematic (thing)
- thorndike's law — the principle that all learnt behaviour is regulated by rewards and punishments, proposed by Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949), US psychologist
- titius-bode law — Bode's law.
- to cross swords — If you cross swords with someone, you disagree with them and argue with them about something.
- to sow gapeseed — to stare in a gaping manner instead of attending to business
- transfer window — the period during the year in which a football club can transfer players from other teams into their own
- troubled waters — a confused or chaotic state of affairs: The situation was terrible, but like many politicians he was attracted by troubled waters.
- two-dimensional — having the dimensions of height and width only: a two-dimensional surface.
- two-thirds rule — a former rule in the Democratic Party, effective 1832–1936, requiring a vote of at least two thirds of its national convention delegates to nominate a presidential and vice-presidential candidate.
- unknown soldier — an unidentified soldier killed in battle and buried with honors, the tomb serving as a memorial to all the unidentified dead of a nation's armed forces. The tomb of the American Unknown Soldier, commemorating a serviceman killed in World War I, was established in the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia in 1921. In 1958, the remains of personnel of World War II and the Korean War were buried alongside the tomb (now called the Tomb of the Unknowns, ). In 1984, a serviceman of the Vietnam War was interred next to the others.
- w.h. richardson — Henry Handel (Henrietta Richardson Robertson) 1870–1946, Australian novelist.
- waddesdon manor — a mansion near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire: built (1880–89) in the French style for the Rothschild family: noted for its furnishings and collections of porcelain and paintings
- waterford glass — fine cut or gilded glass made in Waterford, Ireland, having a slight blue cast due to the presence of cobalt.
- well-accustomed — customary; usual; habitual: in their accustomed manner.
- well-considered — thought about or decided upon with care: a considered opinion.
- well-formedness — rightly or pleasingly formed: a well-formed contour.
- well-positioned — condition with reference to place; location; situation.
- well-understood — simple past tense and past participle of understand.
- west des moines — a city in S central Iowa, near Des Moines.
- widow's benefit — (in the British National Insurance scheme) a former weekly payment made to a widow
- widow's pension — (in the British National Insurance scheme) a weekly payment made to a widow
- wilderness road — a 300-mile (500-km) route from eastern Virginia through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, explored by Daniel Boone in 1769 and marked as a trail by him and other pioneers in 1775: a major route for early settlers moving west.
- window dressing — the art, act, or technique of trimming the display windows of a store.
- window shopping — browsing store displays
- window-dressing — the art, act, or technique of trimming the display windows of a store.
- windows sockets — (networking, standard) (Winsock) A specification for Microsoft Windows network software, describing how applications can access network services, especially TCP/IP. Winsock is intended to provide a single API to which application developers should program and to which multiple network software vendors should conform. For any particular version of Microsoft Windows, it defines a binary interface (ABI) such that an application written to the Windows Sockets API can work with a conformant protocol implementation from any network software vendor. Winsock was conceived at Fall Interop '91 during a Birds of a Feather session. Windows Sockets is supported by Microsoft Windows, Windows for Workgroups, Win32s, Windows 95 and Windows NT. It will support protocols other than TCP/IP. Under Windows NT, Microsoft will provide Windows Sockets support over TCP/IP and IPX/SPX. DEC will be implementing DECNet. Windows NT will include mechanisms for multiple protocol support in Windows Sockets, both 32-bit and 16 bit. Mark Towfiq said, "The next rev. of Winsock will not be until toward the end of 1993. We need 1.1 of the API to become firmly settled and implemented first." Currently NetManage (NEWT), Distinct, FTP and Frontier are shipping Winsock TCP/IP stacks, as is Microsoft (Windows NT and TCP/IP for WFW), Beame & Whiteside Software (v1.1 compliant), and Sun PC-NFS. Windows 95 has "dial-up networking" which supports Winsock and TCP/IP. winsock.dll is available from some TCP/IP stack vendors. Novell has one in beta for their Lan Workplace for DOS. Peter Tattam <[email protected]> is alpha-testing a shareware Windows Sockets compliant TCP/IP stack ftp://ftp.utas.edu.au/pc/trumpet/winsock/winsock.zip. and ftp://ftp.utas.edu.au/pc/trumpet/winsock/winpkt.com.
- winter holidays — a period of rest from work or studies taken in winter
- women's studies — a program of studies concentrating on the role of women in history, learning, and culture.
- wonder-stricken — struck or affected with wonder.
- word processing — writing, editing, and production of documents, as letters, reports, and books, through the use of a computer program or a complete computer system designed to facilitate rapid and efficient manipulation of text. Abbreviation: WP.
- work/do wonders — If you say that a person or thing works wonders or does wonders, you mean that they have a very good effect on something.
- wrongheadedness — The state of being wrongheaded.
- x window system — (operating system, graphics) A specification for device-independent windowing operations on bitmap display devices, developed initially by MIT's Project Athena and now a de facto standard supported by the X Consortium. X was named after an earlier window system called "W". It is a window system called "X", not a system called "X Windows". X uses a client-server protocol, the X protocol. The server is the computer or X terminal with the screen, keyboard, mouse and server program and the clients are application programs. Clients may run on the same computer as the server or on a different computer, communicating over Ethernet via TCP/IP protocols. This is confusing because X clients often run on what people usually think of as their server (e.g. a file server) but in X, it is the screen and keyboard etc. which is being "served out" to the applications. X is used on many Unix systems. It has also been described as over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly over-complicated. X11R6 (version 11, release 6) was released in May 1994. See also Andrew project, PEX, VNC, XFree86.