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19-letter words containing f, a, c, u

  • fellow countrywoman — a fellow countrywoman is a female citizen of the same state as the person speaking, writing, or being referred to
  • female circumcision — clitoridectomy.
  • financial ombudsman — any of five British ombudsmen: the Banking Ombudsman, set up in 1986 to investigate complaints from bank customers; the Building Society Ombudsman, set up in 1987 to investigate complaints from building society customers; the Insurance Ombudsman, set up in 1981 to investigate complaints by policyholders (since 1988 this ombudsman has also operated a Unit Trust Ombudsman scheme); the Investment Ombudsman set up in 1989 to investigate complaints by investors (the Personal Investment Authority Ombudsman is responsible for investigating complaints by personal investors); and the Pensions Ombudsman, set up in 1993 to investigate complaints regarding pension schemes
  • flannelmouth sucker — a sucker, Catostomus latipinnis, of the Colorado River and its tributaries.
  • fluophosphoric acid — fluorophosphoric acid.
  • focal plane shutter — an opaque shield in a camera, lying in the focal plane of the lens, that, when tripped, admits light to expose the film or plate for a predetermined period, usually a fraction of a second
  • focal-plane shutter — a camera shutter situated directly in front of the film.
  • forensic accountant — an accountant who specializes in applying accountancy skills to the purposes of the law
  • foundation subjects — the subjects studied as part of the National Curriculum, including the compulsory core subjects
  • four-o'clock family — the plant family Nyctaginaceae, characterized by chiefly tropical herbaceous plants and shrubs having colored, petallike bracts beneath petalless flowers and winged or grooved dry fruit, and including the bougainvillea and four-o'clock.
  • fractional currency — coins or paper money of a smaller denomination than the basic monetary unit.
  • franco-prussian war — the war between France and Prussia, 1870–71.
  • fraternal insurance — insurance underwritten by a fraternal society, under either a legal reserve plan or an assessment plan.
  • full-wave rectifier — a rectifier that transmits both halves of a cycle of alternating current as a direct current.
  • functional analysis — the branch of mathematics that deals with the theory of vector spaces and linear functionals.
  • functional calculus — the branch of symbolic logic that includes the sentential calculus and that deals with sentential functions and quantifiers and with logical relations between sentences containing quantifiers.
  • functional currency — Functional currency is the main currency used by a business.
  • functional database — (database, language)   A database which uses a functional language as its query language. Databases would seem to be an inappropriate application for functional languages since, a purely functional language would have to return a new copy of the entire database every time (part of) it was updated. To be practically scalable, the update mechanism must clearly be destructive rather than functional; however it is quite feasible for the query language to be purely functional so long as the database is considered as an argument. One approach to the update problem would use a monad to encapsulate database access and ensure it was single threaded. Alternative approaches have been suggested by Trinder, who suggests non-destructive updating with shared data structures, and Sutton who uses a variant of a Phil Wadler's linear type system. There are two main classes of functional database languages. The first is based upon Backus' FP language, of which FQL is probably the best known example. Adaplan is a more recent language which falls into this category. More recently, people have been working on languages which are syntactically very similar to modern functional programming languages, but which also provide all of the features of a database language, e.g. bulk data structures which can be incrementally updated, type systems which can be incrementally updated, and all data persisting in a database. Examples are PFL [Poulovassilis&Small, VLDB-91], and Machiavelli [Ohori et al, ACM SIGMOD Conference, 1998].
  • functional language — (language)   A language that supports and encourages functional programming.
  • functional medicine — individualized medical care that recognizes the interactions between genetic and environmental factors and between the body's interconnected systems.
  • greenstick fracture — an incomplete fracture of a long bone, in which one side is broken and the other side is still intact.
  • guerrilla financing — the use of unconventional and marginally legal means to capitalize enterprises
  • gulf of carpentaria — a shallow inlet of the Arafura Sea, in N Australia between Arnhem Land and Cape York Peninsula
  • gulf of tehuantepec — an inlet of the Pacific on the south coast of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in S Mexico
  • hatfield-mccoy feud — a blood feud between two mountain clans on the West Virginia–Kentucky border, the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky, that grew out of their being on opposite sides during the Civil War and was especially violent during 1880–90.
  • incomplete fracture — a fracture extending partly across the bone.
  • index-tracking fund — an investment fund that is administered so that its value changes in line with a given share index
  • jacques montgolfier — Jacques Étienne [zhahk ey-tyen] /ʒɑk eɪˈtyɛn/ (Show IPA), 1745–99, and his brother Joseph Michel [zhaw-zef mee-shel] /ʒɔˈzɛf miˈʃɛl/ (Show IPA) 1740–1810, French aeronauts: inventors of the first practical balloon 1783.
  • juan de fuca strait — strait between Vancouver Island and NW Wash.: c. 100 mi (161 km) long
  • judicial conference — a conference of judges held to discuss improvements in methods or judicial procedure through court rules or otherwise.
  • lagrangian function — kinetic potential.
  • landrum-griffin act — an act of Congress (1959) outlawing secondary boycotts, requiring public disclosure of the financial records of unions, and guaranteeing the use of secret ballots in union voting.
  • languages of choice — C and Lisp. Nearly every hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities. There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with Fortran, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as Real Programmers, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of Mel"). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but HLL implementation, glue, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. Fortran occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming. Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and Ada, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or other traditional card walloper languages as a total and unmitigated loss.
  • left-luggage locker — a coin-operated locker in which luggage can be left
  • left-luggage office — a checkroom for baggage.
  • lift the curtain on — to begin
  • malice aforethought — a predetermination to commit an unlawful act without just cause or provocation (applied chiefly to cases of first-degree murder).
  • malicious falsehood — a lie told by someone who knows the lie is false or knows it will do harm to the person it is concerning
  • manufacturing plant — factory
  • means of production — resources: equipment, workers
  • minimum iron fabric — cloth used to make clothes that require little ironing
  • municipal bond fund — a mutual fund that invests in municipal bonds.
  • mutual fund company — a company that sells and manages mutual funds
  • neats vs. scruffies — (artificial intelligence, jargon)   The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in artificial intelligence research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; "neats" tend to try to build systems that "reason" in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while "scruffies" profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favour looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture "common sense" of living intelligences.
  • neufchâtel (cheese) — a soft white cheese prepared from whole milk or skim milk and eaten fresh or cured
  • objectfuscated code — (humour, programming)   Object-oriented code which has been abstracted to so many levels that no-one can understand it anymore. A play on obfuscated code.
  • on cue/as if on cue — If you say that something happened on cue or as if on cue, you mean that it happened just when it was expected to happen, or just at the right time.
  • open-hearth furnace — a process of steelmaking in which the charge is laid in a furnace (open-hearth furnace) on a shallow hearth and heated directly by burning gas as well as radiatively by the furnace walls.
  • performance figures — the statistics that indicate how well or badly a company or organization has performed
  • peroxysulfuric acid — persulfuric acid (def 1).
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