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21-letter words containing f, a, i

  • make a pig of oneself — If you say that someone is making a pig of themselves, you are criticizing them for eating a very large amount at one meal.
  • make up for lost time — compensate for past inaction
  • manufacturing company — a company that manufactures goods
  • manufacturing process — chain of production
  • mayor of casterbridge — a novel (1886) by Thomas Hardy.
  • microsoft corporation — (company)   The biggest supplier of operating systems and other software for IBM PC compatibles. Software products include MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Windows NT, Microsoft Access, LAN Manager, MS Client, SQL Server, Open Data Base Connectivity (ODBC), MS Mail, and SNA Server for Windows NT. Microsoft was founded as "Micro-soft" in 1975 by Bill Gates (now CEO) and his high school pal Paul Allen. Their first product was a version of BASIC for the new Altair computer [which one?]. In 1980, IBM chose Microsoft to supply the operating system for the IBM PC. On the UK television program "The Net" in May 1994, Bill Gates said he was betting his company on the information highway". Quarterly sales $1293M, profits $362M (Aug 1994).
  • modulus of elasticity — the ratio of the stress applied to a body or substance to the resulting strain within the elastic limit
  • multiplication factor — the ratio of the number of neutrons in a generation to the number of neutrons in the previous generation: when the multiplication factor is equal to or greater than one, a chain reaction is possible
  • muon-catalysed fusion — an experimental form of nuclear fusion in which hydrogen and deuterium muonic atoms are formed. Because the mass of the muon is much larger than that of the electron, the atoms are smaller, and the nuclei are close enough for fusion to occur
  • myocardial infarction — heart attack. Abbreviation: MI.
  • necrotising fasciitis — a disease caused by the bacterium streptococcus pyogenes, in which the fasciae of the muscles or other organs become inflamed, resulting in rapid destruction of overlying tissues
  • nellis air force base — the largest air base in the U.S. Air Force's Tactical Air Command, located near Las Vegas, Nev., and developed from what began in 1941 as a U.S. Army Air Corps field.
  • nightmare file system — Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher spl level). Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the entire network of machines is frozen - worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great misfeature). ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s. See also broadcast storm.
  • nitrosylsulfuric acid — a clear, straw-colored, oily, corrosive liquid, HNO 5 S, used chiefly in the manufacture of dyes.
  • nominative of address — a noun naming the person to whom one is speaking.
  • north pacific current — a warm current flowing eastward across the Pacific Ocean.
  • of time and the river — a novel (1935) by Thomas Wolfe.
  • one foot in the grave — near to death
  • one-way hash function — (algorithm)   (Or "message digest function") A one-way function which takes a variable-length message and produces a fixed-length hash. Given the hash it is computationally infeasible to find a message with that hash; in fact one can't determine any usable information about a message with that hash, not even a single bit. For some one-way hash functions it's also computationally impossible to determine two messages which produce the same hash. A one-way hash function can be private or public, just like an encryption function. MD5, SHA and Snefru are examples of public one-way hash functions. A public one-way hash function can be used to speed up a public-key digital signature system. Rather than sign a long message, which can take a long time, compute the one-way hash of the message, and sign the hash.
  • operational amplifier — a high-gain, high-input impedance amplifier, usually an integrated circuit, that can perform mathematical operations when suitably wired.
  • pacific daylight time — the version of Pacific Standard Time that is in use when daylight saving time is being observed
  • pacific standard time — See under standard time.
  • part of the furniture — If you describe someone or something as part of the furniture, you are suggesting that they have been somewhere such as their place of work for such a long time that it is hard to imagine that place without them.
  • partial reinforcement — the process of randomly rewarding an organism for making a response on only some of the occasions it makes it
  • partition coefficient — the ratio of the concentrations of a substance in two heterogenous phases in equilibrium with each other
  • pathfinder prospectus — a prospectus regarding the flotation of a new company that contains only sufficient details to test the market reaction
  • pellitory-of-the-wall — an urticaceous plant, P. diffusa, of the S and W European genus Parietaria, which grows in crevices and has long narrow leaves and small pink flowers
  • performance appraisal — the assessment, at regular intervals, of an employee's performance at work
  • performance indicator — a quantitative or qualitative measurement, or any other criterion, by which the performance, efficiency, achievement, etc of a person or organization can be assessed, often by comparison with an agreed standard or target
  • performance-enhancing — noting or relating to a drug or other substance used to improve one's performance in a sport or other activity requiring strength, stamina, etc.: The use of performance-enhancing steroids by athletes is banned.
  • peroxydisulfuric acid — persulfuric acid (def 2).
  • piero della francesca — Piero della [pee-air-oh del-uh;; Italian pye-raw del-lah] /piˈɛər oʊ ˈdɛl ə;; Italian ˈpyɛ rɔ ˈdɛl lɑ/ (Show IPA), (Piero dei Franceschi) c1420–92, Italian painter.
  • place of articulation — the location at which two speech organs approach or come together in producing a speech sound, as in the contact of the tongue and the teeth to form a dental sound. Also called point of articulation. Compare articulator (def 2).
  • play with a full deck — Nautical. a floorlike surface wholly or partially occupying one level of a hull, superstructure, or deckhouse, generally cambered, and often serving as a member for strengthening the structure of a vessel. the space between such a surface and the next such surface above: Our stateroom was on B deck.
  • point of articulation — place of articulation.
  • powersoft corporation — (company)   A leading vendor of client/server application development tools. In February 1994, Watcom became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Powersoft Corporation which merged with Sybase on 13 February 1995. In April 1995, the new company is the fastest growing top-ten software company and the seventh largest software company in the world. Headquarters: Concord, Massachusetts, USA.
  • preacquisition profit — the retained profit of a company earned before a takeover and therefore not eligible for distribution as a dividend to the shareholders of the acquiring company
  • professional services — (job)   A department of a supplier providing consultancy and programming manpower for the supplier's products.
  • profit-sharing scheme — a scheme employing profit-sharing; a system in which a portion of the net profit of a business is distributed to its employees, usually in proportion to their wages or their length of service
  • program temporary fix — (programming)   (PTF) (Colloquially: Probably This Fixes) An IBM sanctioned patch, often implemented using ZAP or SUPERZAP.
  • promoter of the faith — devil's advocate (def 2).
  • psychological warfare — the use of propaganda, threats, and other psychological techniques to mislead, intimidate, demoralize, or otherwise influence the thinking or behavior of an opponent.
  • radius of convergence — a positive number so related to a given power series that the power series converges for every number whose absolute value is less than this particular number.
  • range of significance — the set of subjects for which a given predicate is intelligible
  • reconnaissance flight — a flight made by an aircraft in order to obtain military information about a particular place
  • record of achievement — a statement of the personal and educational development of each pupil
  • referential integrity — (database)   A collection of properties which should be possessed by data in a relational database. For example, in a database of family members, if we enter A as a spouse of B, we should also enter B as a spouse of A. Similarly, if we remove one end of the relationship we should also remove the other.
  • reinforcement therapy — a behavior modification technique in which appropriate behavior is strengthened through systematic reinforcement.
  • road traffic accident — an accident involving vehicles
  • rutherford scattering — the scattering of an alpha particle through a large angle with respect to the original direction of motion of the particle, caused by an atom (Rutherford atom) with most of the mass and all of the positive electric charge concentrated at a center or nucleus.
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