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21-letter words containing e, a, r

  • universal disk format — (storage, standard)   (UDF) A CD-ROM file system standard that is required for DVD ROMs. UDF is the OSTA's replacement for the ISO 9660 file system used on CD-ROMs, but will be mostly used on DVD. DVD multimedia disks use UDF to contain MPEG audio and video streams. To read DVDs you need a DVD drive, the kernel driver for the drive, MPEG video support, and a UDF driver. DVDs containing both UDF filesystems and ISO 9660 filesystems can be read without UDF support. UDF can also be used by CD-R and CD-RW recorders in packet writing mode.
  • university of arizona — (body, education)   The University was founded in 1885 as a Land Grant institution with a three-fold mission of teaching, research and public service. Today, the University is one of the top 20 research universities in the nation, with a student enrollment of more than 35,000, a faculty and staff of 12,500, and a 345-acre campus. Address: Tucson, Arizona, USA.
  • university of iceland — (body, education)   The Home of Fjolnir.
  • up close and personal — face to face, intimately
  • venus's flower basket — a glass sponge of the genus Euplectella, inhabiting deep waters off the Philippines and Japan, having a cylindrical skeleton formed of an intricate latticework of siliceous spicules.
  • verbatim et literatim — word for word and letter for letter; in exactly the same words.
  • vertically challenged — short in stature.
  • veterinary technician — a veterinarian’s assistant, trained to provide medical care for animals, as performing diagnostic tests or administering vaccines and medication.
  • virginia (rail) fence — a zigzag fence made of rails laid across one another at the ends
  • virtual device driver — (operating system)   (VxD) A device driver under Windows 3.x/Windows 95 running as part of the kernel and thus having access to the memory of the kernel and all running processes as well as raw access to the hardware. VxD's usually have the filename extension .386 under Windows 3.x and .vxd under Windows 95. VxD's written for Windows 3.x can be used under Windows 95 but not vice versa.
  • virtual memory system — (operating system)   (VMS) DEC's proprietary operating system originally produced for its VAX minicomputer. VMS V1 was released in August 1978. VMS was renamed "OpenVMS" around version 5.5. The first version of VMS on DEC Alpha was known as OpenVMS for AXP V1.0, and the correct way to refer to the operating system now is OpenVMS for VAX or OpenVMS for Alpha. The renaming also signified the fact that the X/Open consortium had certified OpenVMS as having a high support for POSIX standards. VMS is one of the most secure operating systems on the market (making it popular in financial institutions). It currently (October 1997) has the best clustering capability (both number and distance) and is very scalable with binaries portable from small desktop workstations up to huge mainframes. Many Unix fans generously concede that VMS would probably be the hacker's favourite commercial OS if Unix didn't exist; though true, this makes VMS fans furious.
  • vladivostok agreement — a preliminary arms control accord concluded by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and U.S. President Gerald Ford in Vladivostok, U.S.S.R., in December 1974.
  • voice-stress analyzer — a machine purported to detect stress in a human voice and to ascertain a person's truthfulness.
  • voluntary arrangement — a procedure enabling an insolvent company to come to an arrangement with its creditors and resolve its financial problems, often in compliance with a court order
  • volunteers of america — a religious reform and relief organization, similar to the Salvation Army, founded in New York City in 1896 by Ballington Booth, son of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. Abbreviation: VOA.
  • warm silence software — A small company run by(?) Robin Watts, producing software for the Acorn Archimedes.
  • watenstedt-salzgitter — former name of Salzgitter.
  • water of constitution — water present in a molecule that cannot be removed without disrupting the molecule.
  • water-vascular system — a system of closed, fluid-filled tubes and ducts of echinoderms used in clinging, locomotion, feeding, and respiration.
  • weak head normal form — (reduction, theory)   (WHNF) A lambda expression is in weak head normal form (WHNF) if it is a head normal form (HNF) or any lambda abstraction. I.e. the top level is not a redex. The term was coined by Simon Peyton Jones to make explicit the difference between head normal form (HNF) and what graph reduction systems produce in practice. A lambda abstraction with a reducible body, e.g. \ x . ((\ y . y+x) 2) is in WHNF but not HNF. To reduce this expression to HNF would require reduction of the lambda body: (\ y . y+x) 2 --> 2+x Reduction to WHNF avoids the name capture problem with its need for alpha conversion of an inner lambda abstraction and so is preferred in practical graph reduction systems. The same principle is often used in strict languages such as Scheme to provide call-by-name evaluation by wrapping an expression in a lambda abstraction with no arguments: D = delay E = \ () . E The value of the expression is obtained by applying it to the empty argument list:
  • weinberg-salam theory — electroweak theory.
  • west university place — a city in SE Texas.
  • what price something? — what are the chances of something happening now?
  • what the future holds — If you wonder what the future holds, you wonder what will happen in the future.
  • whip-and-tongue graft — a graft prepared by cutting both the scion and the stock in a sloping direction and inserting a tongue in the scion into a slit in the stock.
  • whistling in the dark — If you say that someone is whistling in the dark, you mean that they are trying to remain brave and convince themselves that the situation is not as bad as it seems.
  • white-crowned sparrow — a North American sparrow, Zonotrichia leucophrys, having black and white stripes on the head.
  • white-knuckle paddler — an inexpert and timid canoeist.
  • wholesale price index — an indicator of price changes in the wholesale market
  • wildlife photographer — someone that specializes in taking photographs of wild animals, especially in their natural habitats, and plants
  • william of malmesbury — William of, William of Malmesbury.
  • william the conqueror — ("the Conqueror") 1027–87, duke of Normandy 1035–87; king of England 1066–87 (son of Robert I, duke of Normandy).
  • with a capital letter — (used to give emphasis to a statement)
  • with one's bare hands — If someone does something with their bare hands, they do it without using any weapons or tools.
  • word association test — a technique for determining a subject's associative pattern by providing a verbal stimulus to which a verbal response is required.
  • word-association test — a psychological test in which the person being tested responds to a given word with the first word (or the first word in a specified category, such as an antonym) brought to mind
  • workers' compensation — a government-sponsored insurance system, funded by contributions from employers, for compensating employees for injury or occupational disease suffered in connection with their employment
  • writ of habeas corpus — law: petition for hearing
  • xeroderma pigmentosum — a rare inherited disease characterized by sensitivity to ultraviolet light, exposure resulting in lesions and tumors of the skin and eyes.
  • xilinx netlist format — (language, electronics)   (XNF) A Hardware Description Language for electronic circuit design, developed by Xilinx, Inc..
  • yellow lady's-slipper — a showy orchid, Cypripedium calceolus, of eastern North America, having purple-tinged yellow flowers with an inflated lip petal.
  • yellow-rumped warbler — a common North American wood warbler, Dendroica coronata, having yellow spots on the rump, crown, and sides, including a white-throated eastern subspecies (myrtle warbler) and a yellow-throated western subspecies (Audubon's warbler)
  • yellow-throated vireo — an olive-green vireo, Vireo flavifrons, of eastern North America, having a bright yellow throat and breast.
  • your mileage may vary — (jargon)   (YMMV) The disclaimer American car manufacturers attached to EPA mileage ratings. A humourous way of saying that the thing under discussion will not necessarily give you the same results as the author. Often used to convey the hardware dependence of Unix freeware distributions.
  • youth training scheme — (formerly, in Britain) a scheme, run by the Training Agency, to provide vocational training for unemployed 16–17-year-olds
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