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21-letter words containing f, a, n, i, o

  • conspiracy of silence — If there is a conspiracy of silence about something, people who know about it have agreed that they will not talk publicly about it, although it would probably be a good thing if people in general knew about it.
  • contextual definition — definition of a word or symbol by explaining the meaning of the phrase or statement in which it occurs.
  • continental breakfast — A continental breakfast is breakfast that consists of food such as bread, butter, jam, and a hot drink. There is no cooked food.
  • conway's game of life — (simulation)   The first popular cellular automata based artificial life simulation. Life was invented by British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970 and was first introduced publicly in "Scientific American" later that year. Conway first devised what he called "The Game of Life" and "ran" it using plates placed on floor tiles in his house. Because of he ran out of floor space and kept stepping on the plates, he later moved to doing it on paper or on a checkerboard and then moved to running Life as a computer program on a PDP-7. That first implementation of Life as a computer program was written by M. J. T. Guy and S. R. Bourne (the author of Unix's Bourne shell). Life uses a rectangular grid of binary (live or dead) cells each of which is updated at each step according to the previous state of its eight neighbours as follows: a live cell with less than two, or more than three, live neighbours dies. A dead cell with exactly three neighbours becomes alive. Other cells do not change. While the rules are fairly simple, the patterns that can arise are of a complexity resembling that of organic systems -- hence the name "Life". Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with Life, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented Life in TECO!; see Gosperism). When a hacker mentions "life", he is more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, the 1950s-era board game or the human state of existence.
  • correctional facility — A correctional facility is a prison or similar institution.
  • cost-benefit analysis — an analysis that takes into account the costs of a project and its benefits to society, as well as the revenue it generates
  • customer satisfaction — When customers are pleased with the goods or services they have bought, you can refer to customer satisfaction.
  • defender of the faith — the title conferred upon Henry VIII by Pope Leo X in 1521 in recognition of the King's pamphlet attacking Luther's doctrines and retained by subsequent monarchs of England
  • degradation of energy — the principle that during any irreversible process the total energy available to do work decreases.
  • delusions of grandeur — If someone has delusions of grandeur, they think and behave as if they are much more important or powerful than they really are.
  • demand-pull inflation — inflation in which rising demand results in a rise in prices.
  • department of justice — the department of the U.S. federal government charged with the responsibility for the enforcement of federal laws. Abbreviation: DOJ.
  • detoxification centre — a place that specializes in the treatment of alcoholism or drug addiction
  • dictionary definition — the meaning of a word as given in a dictionary or dictionaries
  • differential equation — an equation involving differentials or derivatives.
  • differential geometry — the branch of mathematics that deals with the application of the principles of differential and integral calculus to the study of curves and surfaces.
  • differential operator — a function, usually expressed as a polynomial, that indicates linear combinations of the derivatives of the expression on which it operates.
  • differential quotient — derivative (def 6).
  • differential topology — the branch of topology that studies the properties of differentiable manifolds that remain invariant under diffeomorphisms.
  • differential-quotient — something that has been derived.
  • discriminant function — a linear function of measurements of different properties of an object or event that is used to assign the object or event to one population or another (discriminant analysis)
  • drop the handkerchief — a children's game in which all the players but one stand in a circle facing inward, while that one player stealthily drops a handkerchief behind a player in the circle who must pursue and attempt to catch the one who dropped the handkerchief before the latter reaches the vacated place.
  • dumfries and galloway — a region in S Scotland. 2460 sq. mi. (6371 sq. km).
  • electromagnetic field — a field of force associated with a moving electric charge equivalent to an electric field and a magnetic field at right angles to each other and to the direction of propagation
  • faculty board meeting — a meeting of the governing body of a faculty
  • file allocation table — (file system)   (FAT) The component of an MS-DOS or Windows 95 file system which describes the files, directories, and free space on a hard disk or floppy disk. A disk is divided into partitions. Under the FAT file system each partition is divided into clusters, each of which can be one or more sectors, depending on the size of the partition. Each cluster is either allocated to a file or directory or it is free (unused). A directory lists the name, size, modification time and starting cluster of each file or subdirectory it contains. At the start of the partition is a table (the FAT) with one entry for each cluster. Each entry gives the number of the next cluster in the same file or a special value for "not allocated" or a special value for "this is the last cluster in the chain". The first few clusters after the FAT contain the root directory. The FAT file system was originally created for the CP/M[?] operating system where files were catalogued using 8-bit addressing. MS DOS's FAT allows only 8.3 filenames. With the introduction of MS-DOS 4 an incompatible 16-bit FAT (FAT16) with 32-kilobyte clusters was introduced that allowed partitions of up to 2 gigabytes. Microsoft later created FAT32 to support partitions larger than two gigabytes and pathnames greater that 256 characters. It also allows more efficient use of disk space since clusters are four kilobytes rather than 32 kilobytes. FAT32 was first available in OEM Service Release 2 of Windows 95 in 1996. It is not fully backward compatible with the 16-bit and 8-bit FATs. Compare: NTFS.
  • finite state automata — Finite State Machine
  • first baron ashburton — Alexander, 1st Baron Ashburton, 1774–1848, British statesman.
  • first consonant shift — the consonant shift described by Grimm's law, which distinguishes Germanic languages from other Indo-European languages.
  • first-round financing — First round financing is the first time a new company raises money from investors.
  • flotation compartment — in a boat, an enclosed section filled with air or gas to give buoyancy
  • food conversion ratio — a ratio expressing the weight of food required to produce a unit gain in the live weight of an animal
  • foot-in-mouth disease — the habit of making inappropriate, insensitive, or imprudent statements.
  • foreign exchange rate — the rate that specifies how much the currency of a nation is worth in terms of the currency of another nation
  • forensic anthropology — the branch of physical anthropology in which anthropological data, criteria, and techniques are used to determine the sex, age, genetic population, or parentage of skeletal or biological materials in questions of civil or criminal law.
  • fort lesley j. mcnair — a military reservation in SW Washington, D.C., on the Potomac River, SW of the Capitol.
  • fractional extraction — Fractional extraction is a process of extracting a liquid from a liquid, in which two solutes are separated, with one leaving in the extract and one in the raffinate.
  • fragmentation grenade — a grenade with a heavy metal casing that shatters, on exploding, into fragments that travel at high speed and with great force.
  • framing specification — A specification of the "protocol bits" that surround the "data bits" on a communications channel to allow the data to be "framed" into chunks, like start and stop bits in EIA-232. It allows a receiver to synchronize at points along the data stream.
  • franco-belgian system — French system.
  • frankfort on the main — a city in W central Germany, on the Main River.
  • fraudulent conversion — conversion committed with the intent to defraud
  • free alongside vessel — (of a shipment of goods) delivered to the dock without charge to the buyer, but excluding the cost of loading onto the vessel
  • free-floating anxiety — chronic anxiety occurring for no identifiable cause
  • french fried potatoes — a more formal name for chips
  • functional dependency — (database)   Given a relation R (in a relational database), attribute Y of R is functionally dependent on attribute X of R and X of R functionally determines Y of R (in symbols R.X -> R.Y) if and only if each X in R has associated with it precisely one Y in R (at any one time). Attributes X and Y may be composite. This is very close to a function in the mathematical sense.
  • functional illiterate — a person with some basic education who still falls short of a minimum standard of literacy or whose reading and writing skills are inadequate to everyday needs.
  • functional imperative — a requirement for the survival of any social system, as communication, control of conflict, or socialization.
  • general of the armies — a special rank held by John J. Pershing, equivalent to general of the army.
  • genetic amplification — an increase in the frequency of replication of a DNA segment.
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