20-letter words containing e, a, r, t
- 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.
- get away from it all — If you get away from it all, you have a holiday in a place that is very different from where you normally live and work.
- get away with murder — Law. the killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder) and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)
- girdle-tailed lizard — any African lizard of the family Cordylidae, having a spiny tail used in defense.
- give a wide berth to — to keep clear of; avoid
- give one's right arm — to be prepared to make any sacrifice
- give someone the air — a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and minute amounts of other gases that surrounds the earth and forms its atmosphere.
- glyceryl monoacetate — acetin.
- go against the grain — If you say that an idea or action goes against the grain, you mean that it is very difficult for you to accept it or do it, because it conflicts with your previous ideas, beliefs, or principles.
- go from bad to worse — worsen
- go like the clappers — to move extremely fast
- 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
- grand right and left — a figure called in square dancing in which partners face each other, forming a small circle, and then advance around the circle by extending alternating right and left hands to pull past each new person until they reach their partners again.
- grand unified theory — a possible future quantum field theory that would encompass both the electroweak theory and quantum chromodynamics. Abbreviation: GUT.
- 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 dividing range — a mountain range extending along the E coast of Australia: vast watershed region. 100 to 200 miles (160–320 km) wide.
- great northern diver — a large northern bird, Gavia immer, with a black-and-white chequered back and a black head and neck in summer: family Gaviidae (divers)
- 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.
- great-great-grandson — the grandson of a grandchild
- greatest lower bound — a lower bound that is greater than or equal to all the lower bounds of a given set: 1 is the greatest lower bound of the set consisting of 1, 2, 3. Abbreviation: glb.
- green mountain state — Vermont (used as a nickname).
- group representation — representation in a governing body on the basis of interests rather than by geographical location.
- hampton court palace — a royal palace in Hampton, London, built in 1515 by Cardinal Wolsey
- hard gelatin capsule — A hard gelatin capsule is a type of capsule that is usually used to contain medicine in the form of dry powder or very small pellets.
- harvard architecture — (architecture) A computer architecture in which program instructions are stored in different memory from data. Each type of memory is accessed via a separate bus, allowing instructions and data to be fetched in parallel. Contrast: von Neumann architecture.
- hate a person's guts — to dislike a person very strongly
- hawaii-standard-time — Alaska-Hawaii time.
- health questionnaire — A health questionnaire is a list of questions about someone's health issued by underwriters before accepting a person as a risk.
- heat of vaporization — the heat absorbed per unit mass of a given material at its boiling point that completely converts the material to a gas at the same temperature: equal to the heat of condensation.
- 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.
- heston and isleworth — a former borough, now part of Hounslow, in SE England, near London.
- heteropolysaccharide — (carbohydrate) any polysaccharide formed from two or more different kinds of monosaccharide.
- hexafluoroantimonate — (inorganic chemistry) The anion SbF6- or any salt containing this anion; it is used as an acidic catalyst in epoxide opening reactions.
- 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.
- high-energy particle — Physics
- hipparchus satellite — an astronometric satellite launched in 1989 by the European Space Agency that measured the position, proper motion, and brightness of 118 218 stars down to 12th magnitude and the magnitude and colour of a million stars down to 10th magnitude
- hire-purchase system — a system of payment for a commodity in regular installments while using it.
- hit-and-run accident — a motor-vehicle accident in which the driver leaves the scene without stopping to give assistance, inform the police, etc
- holy water sprinkler — morning star (def 2).
- honeysuckle ornament — anthemion.
- horizontal microcode — (processor) Microcode using horizontal encoding.
- horizontal scan rate — (hardware) (HSR) The measure of how many scan lines of pixels a monitor can display in one second, expressed in kHz (generally somewhere between 20 and 100 kHz). The HSR is controlled by the horizontal sync signal generated by the video controller, but is limited by the speed with which the monitor can scan the electron beam horizontally across the screen and then return it to the beginning of the next line.
- horizontally opposed — A horizontally opposed engine has the cylinders set horizontally at either side of the crankshaft.
- hot under the collar — the part of a shirt, coat, dress, blouse, etc., that encompasses the neckline of the garment and is sewn permanently to it, often so as to fold or roll over.
- houses of parliament — In Britain, the Houses of Parliament are the British parliament, which consists of two parts, the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The buildings where the British parliament does its work are also called the Houses of Parliament.
- 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.
- human growth hormone — somatotropin. Abbreviation: hGH.
- human interest story — news item about people's lives