17-letter words containing e, a
- disposable income — the part of a person's income remaining after deducting personal income taxes.
- disproportionates — Third-person singular simple present indicative form of disproportionate.
- disrespectability — Lack of respectability.
- disruptive action — action performed by protestors, workers, etc that causes the disruption of a service
- dissociated press — [Play on "Associated Press"; perhaps inspired by a reference in the 1949 Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Up, Doc?"] An algorithm for transforming any text into potentially humorous garbage even more efficiently than by passing it through a marketroid. The algorithm starts by printing any N consecutive words (or letters) in the text. Then at every step it searches for any random occurrence in the original text of the last N words (or letters) already printed and then prints the next word or letter. Emacs has a handy command for this. Here is a short example of word-based Dissociated Press applied to an earlier version of the Jargon File: wart: A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an array (C has no checks for this). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the phrase is bent so as to be not worth paying attention to the medium in question. Here is a short example of letter-based Dissociated Press applied to the same source: window sysIWYG: A bit was named aften /bee't*/ prefer to use the other guy's re, especially in every cast a chuckle on neithout getting into useful informash speech makes removing a featuring a move or usage actual abstractionsidered interj. Indeed spectace logic or problem! A hackish idle pastime is to apply letter-based Dissociated Press to a random body of text and vgrep the output in hopes of finding an interesting new word. (In the preceding example, "window sysIWYG" and "informash" show some promise.) Iterated applications of Dissociated Press usually yield better results. Similar techniques called "travesty generators" have been employed with considerable satirical effect to the utterances of Usenet flamers; see pseudo.
- dissolve in tears — weep
- distance learning — education in which students receive instruction over the Internet, from a video, etc., instead of going to school.
- distance teaching — teaching via correspondence or the internet, where students are not physically present in a classroom
- distillers' grain — a by-product of the distillation process for making whisky, used as an animal foodstuff
- district attorney — an officer who acts as attorney for the people or government within a specified district.
- doberman pinscher — one of a German breed of medium-sized, short-haired dogs having a black, brown, or blue coat with rusty brown markings.
- document examiner — (hypertext, tool) A high-performance hypertext system by Symbolics that provides on-line access to their user documentation.
- dog in the manger — a person who selfishly keeps something that he or she does not really need or want so that others may not use or enjoy it.
- dollar a year man — of or being an official or employee, especially a federal appointee, who receives a token annual salary, usually of one dollar: a dollar-a-year man.
- dollars-and-cents — considered strictly in terms of money: from a dollars-and-cents viewpoint.
- dominant tenement — land in favor of which an easement or other servitude exists over another's land.
- doorstep salesman — a door-to-door salesman
- double insulation — Double insulation is insulation that consists of both basic insulation and supplementary insulation.
- double pair royal — a set of four cards of the same denomination, worth 12 points.
- double quatrefoil — a charge having the form of a foil with eight leaves, used especially as the cadency mark of a ninth son.
- double refraction — the separation of a ray of light into two unequally refracted, plane-polarized rays of orthogonal polarizations, occurring in crystals in which the velocity of light rays is not the same in all directions.
- double track line — a railway line with double track
- douglas engelbart — (person) Douglas C. Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse. On 1968-12-09, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, USA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the on live system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse, hypertext, object addressing, dynamic file linking and shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface. The original 90-minute video: Hyperlinks, Mouse, Web-board.
- dow jones average — The Dow Jones Average is a daily measurement of stock-exchange prices, based on the average price of a selected number of securities.
- down-at-the-heels — of a shabby, run-down appearance; seedy: He is rapidly becoming a down-at-heel drifter and a drunk.
- downwardly mobile — See under vertical mobility (def 1).
- downwardly-mobile — See under vertical mobility (def 1).
- drained of colour — colourless
- dramatis personae — (used with a plural verb) the characters in a play.
- drawn-thread work — ornamental needlework done by drawing threads out of the fabric and using the remaining threads to form lacelike patterns
- dress-down friday — In some companies employees are allowed to wear clothes that are less smart than usual on a Friday. This day is known as a dress-down Friday.
- dressed up as sth — portrayed as
- drink like a fish — any of various cold-blooded, aquatic vertebrates, having gills, commonly fins, and typically an elongated body covered with scales.
- drive to the wall — to force into an awkward situation
- drive up the wall — to cause to become crazy or furious
- drive-by download — an incidence of an unwanted program being automatically downloaded to a computer, often without the user's knowledge
- drool-proof paper — (jargon) Documentation that has been obsessively dumbed down, to the point where only a cretin could bear to read it, is said to have succumbed to the "drool-proof paper syndrome" or to have been "written on drool-proof paper". For example, this is an actual quote from Apple Computer's LaserWriter manual: "Do not expose your LaserWriter to open fire or flame."
- duality principle — the principle that a mathematical duality exists under certain conditions.
- ductus arteriosis — a fetal blood vessel that connects the left pulmonary artery directly to the descending aorta, normally closing after birth.
- due course of law — the regular administration of the law, according to which no citizen may be denied his or her legal rights and all laws must conform to fundamental, accepted legal principles, as the right of the accused to confront his or her accusers.
- dull as dishwater — water in which dishes are, or have been, washed.
- dutch east indies — a former name of the Republic of Indonesia.
- dutch elm disease — a disease of elms characterized by wilting, yellowing, and falling of the leaves and caused by a fungus, Ceratostomella ulmi, transmitted by bark beetles.
- dwarf huckleberry — tangleberry.
- dynamic execution — (processor) A combination of techniques - multiple branch prediction, data flow analysis and speculative execution. Intel implemented Dynamic Execution in the P6 after analysing the execution of billions of lines of code.
- dynamic insurance — Dynamic insurance is a type of insurance coverage where the policyholder can choose to increase benefits and premiums by a fixed percentage each year to offset the effects of inflation.
- dynamically typed — dynamic typing
- dynamics analyzer — (language) (DYANA) An early language specialised for vibrational and other dynamic physical systems.
- early closing day — a day on which most shops in a town or area close after lunch
- early renaissance — a style of art developed principally in Florence, Italy, during the 15th century and characterized chiefly by the development of linear perspective, chiaroscuro, and geometrically based compositions.