21-letter words containing f, a, n
- differential windlass — a pair of hoisting drums of different diameter turning at the same rate, such that a pulley suspended below them on a line wound on the larger drum and unwound from the smaller drum is raised with mechanical advantage.
- 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)
- downhole safety valve — A downhole safety valve is a piece of safety equipment used inside a well, which isolates wellbore pressure and fluid if something bad happens.
- draft once reuse many — (jargon) (DORUM) Reusing parts of a document to produce parts of an entirely new document. The term normally refers to text documents but the practise is equally common in programming.
- 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).
- dwarf japanese quince — a low, shrubby, Japanese flowering quince, Chaenomeles japonica, of the rose family, having salmon-to-orange flowers and yellow fruit.
- 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
- faisal ibn abdul aziz — 1905–75, king of Saudi Arabia (1964–75)
- fall all over oneself — to drop or descend under the force of gravity, as to a lower place through loss or lack of support.
- fall ill/be taken ill — If you fall ill or are taken ill, you suddenly become ill.
- false memory syndrome — a psychological condition in which a person believes that he or she remembers events that have not actually occurred.
- false-memory syndrome — a psychological condition in which a person believes that he or she remembers events that have not actually occurred.
- feline leukemia virus — a retrovirus, mainly affecting cats, that depresses the immune system and leads to opportunistic infections, lymphosarcoma, and other disorders. Abbreviation: FeLV, FLV.
- 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.
- financial times index — one of the indexes of share prices produced by the Financial Times, especially the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index
- financial underwriter — A financial underwriter is an insurance employee working in financial underwriting.
- 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
- food standards agency — the full form of FDA
- 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.
- forward exchange rate — the exchange rate of a currency to be delivered at a later date
- 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.
- frankfort on the oder — a city in NE Germany, on the Oder 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 and indian war — the war in America in which France and its Indian allies opposed England 1754–60: ended by Treaty of Paris in 1763.
- french fried potatoes — a more formal name for chips
- frequent wash shampoo — a shampoo whose mildness allows it to be used frequently
- friuli-venezia giulia — a region in NE Italy: formerly part of Venezia Giulia, most of which was ceded to Yugoslavia (now Croatia and Slovenia) in 1947. 2947 sq. mi. (7630 sq. km).
- from dan to beersheba — from one end of Israel to the other: Judg. 20:1
- full faith and credit — the obligation under Article IV of the U.S. Constitution for each state to recognize the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.
- fuming sulphuric acid — a mixture of pyrosulphuric acid, H2S2O7, and other condensed acids, made by dissolving sulphur trioxide in concentrated sulphuric acid
- 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.