0%

17-letter words containing f, e, d, l

  • drink like a fish — any of various cold-blooded, aquatic vertebrates, having gills, commonly fins, and typically an elongated body covered with scales.
  • 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."
  • drop on the floor — To react to an error condition by silently discarding messages or other valuable data. "The gateway ran out of memory, so it just started dropping packets on the floor." Also frequently used of faulty mail and netnews relay sites that lose messages. See also black hole, bit bucket.
  • droplet infection — infection spread by airborne droplets of secretions from the nose, throat, or lungs.
  • 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.
  • dwarf huckleberry — tangleberry.
  • eat flaming death — (humour, abuse)   A construction popularised among hackers by the infamous CPU Wars comic; supposedly derive from a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something of the sort (however, it is also reported that the Firesign Theater's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own" included the phrase "Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs"; this may have been an influence). Used in humorously overblown expressions of hostility. "Eat flaming death, EBCDIC users!"
  • edward fitzgerald — Edward, 1809–83, English poet: translator of drama and poetry, especially of Omar Khayyám.
  • electrified fence — a barrier that uses electric shocks to deter animals or people from crossing a boundary
  • equalization fund — a monetary reserve established by a country to provide funds for maintaining the official exchange rates of its currency by equalizing the buying and selling of foreign exchange.
  • falkland islander — a person from the Falkland Islands
  • fall on deaf ears — the organ of hearing and equilibrium in vertebrates, in humans consisting of an external ear that gathers sound vibrations, a middle ear in which the vibrations resonate against the tympanic membrane, and a fluid-filled internal ear that maintains balance and that conducts the tympanic vibrations to the auditory nerve, which transmits them as impulses to the brain.
  • false bread-fruit — ceriman.
  • fear and loathing — (Hunter S. Thompson) A state inspired by the prospect of dealing with certain real-world systems and standards that are totally brain-damaged but ubiquitous - Intel 8086s, COBOL, EBCDIC, or any IBM machine except the Rios (also known as the RS/6000).
  • feasibility study — (systems analysis)   Part of the systems develpment life cycle which aims to determine whether it is sensible to develop some system. The most popular model of feasibility study is "TELOS", standing for Technical, Economic, Legal, Operational, Schedule. Technical Feasibility: does the technology exist to implement the proposed system? Is it a practical proposition? Economic Feasibility: is the system cost-effective? Do benefits outweigh costs? Legal Feasibility: is there any conflict between the proposed system and legal requirements, e.g. the Data Protection Act? Operational Feasibility: are the current work practices and procedures adequate to support the new system? Schedule Feasibility: can the system be developed in time? After the feasibility study, the requirements analysis should be carried out.
  • federal land bank — a U.S. federal bank for making long-term loans to farmers.
  • feint-ruled paper — writing paper with light horizontal lines printed across at regular intervals
  • fendalton tractor — a four-wheel drive recreational vehicle
  • fiddleback spider — brown recluse spider.
  • field penny-cress — the common penny-cress, Thlaspi arvense.
  • field post office — a place to which mail intended for military units in the field is sent to be sorted and forwarded
  • field sales force — a team of people selling a product or service in the field as opposed to over the telephone, etc
  • financial adviser — A financial adviser is someone whose job it is to advise people about financial products and services.
  • first-aid classes — classes which teach people how to give immediate medical help in an emergency
  • first-order logic — (language, logic)   The language describing the truth of mathematical formulas. Formulas describe properties of terms and have a truth value. The following are atomic formulas: True False p(t1,..tn) where t1,..,tn are terms and p is a predicate. If F1, F2 and F3 are formulas and v is a variable then the following are compound formulas: The "order" of a logic specifies what entities "For all" and "Exists" may quantify over. First-order logic can only quantify over sets of atomic propositions. (E.g. For all p . p => p). Second-order logic can quantify over functions on propositions, and higher-order logic can quantify over any type of entity. The sets over which quantifiers operate are usually implicit but can be deduced from well-formedness constraints. In first-order logic quantifiers always range over ALL the elements of the domain of discourse. By contrast, second-order logic allows one to quantify over subsets.
  • flagrante delicto — Law. in the very act of committing the offense.
  • flog a dead horse — a large, solid-hoofed, herbivorous quadruped, Equus caballus, domesticated since prehistoric times, bred in a number of varieties, and used for carrying or pulling loads, for riding, and for racing.
  • floppy disk drive — disk drive
  • flowering dogwood — a North American dogwood tree, Cornus florida, having small greenish flowers in the spring, surrounded by white or pink bracts that resemble petals: the state flower and the state tree of Virginia.
  • folie de grandeur — a delusion of grandeur; megalomania.
  • follow the hounds — to hunt a fox, etc. on horseback with hounds
  • follow the leader — a child's game in which players, one behind the other, follow a leader and must repeat or follow everything he or she does.
  • for all the world — the earth or globe, considered as a planet.
  • fore-and-aft sail — any of various sails, as jib-headed sails, gaff sails, lugsails, lateen sails, spritsails, staysails, and jibs, that do not set on yards and whose normal position, when not trimmed, is in a fore-and-aft direction amidships.
  • fort leonard wood — a military reservation and U.S. Army training center in SW Missouri, SW of Rolla.
  • foucault pendulum — a pendulum that demonstrates the rotation of the earth by exhibiting an apparent change in its plane of oscillation.
  • four-letter words — any of a number of short words, usually of four letters, considered offensive or vulgar because of their reference to excrement or sex.
  • four-rowed barley — a class of barley having, in each spike, six rows of grain, with two pairs of rows overlapping.
  • fourfold purchase — a tackle that is composed of a rope passed through two fourfold blocks in such a way as to provide mechanical power in the ratio of 1 to 5 or 1 to 4, depending on whether hauling is done on the running or the standing block and without considering friction. Compare tackle (def 2).
  • fractal dimension — (mathematics)   A common type of fractal dimension is the Hausdorff-Besicovich Dimension, but there are several different ways of computing fractal dimension. Fractal dimension can be calculated by taking the limit of the quotient of the log change in object size and the log change in measurement scale, as the measurement scale approaches zero. The differences come in what is exactly meant by "object size" and what is meant by "measurement scale" and how to get an average number out of many different parts of a geometrical object. Fractal dimensions quantify the static *geometry* of an object. For example, consider a straight line. Now blow up the line by a factor of two. The line is now twice as long as before. Log 2 / Log 2 = 1, corresponding to dimension 1. Consider a square. Now blow up the square by a factor of two. The square is now 4 times as large as before (i.e. 4 original squares can be placed on the original square). Log 4 / log 2 = 2, corresponding to dimension 2 for the square. Consider a snowflake curve formed by repeatedly replacing ___ with _/\_, where each of the 4 new lines is 1/3 the length of the old line. Blowing up the snowflake curve by a factor of 3 results in a snowflake curve 4 times as large (one of the old snowflake curves can be placed on each of the 4 segments _/\_). Log 4 / log 3 = 1.261... Since the dimension 1.261 is larger than the dimension 1 of the lines making up the curve, the snowflake curve is a fractal. [sci.fractals FAQ].
  • frederick pollock — Sir Frederick, 1845–1937, English legal scholar and author.
  • frederick william — 1795–1861, king of Prussia 1840–61 (brother of William I of Prussia).
  • french somaliland — a former name of Djibouti (def 1).
  • front-wheel drive — a drive system in which engine power is transmitted through the front wheels only.
  • full load current — A full load current is the largest current that a motor or other device is designed to carry under particular conditions.
  • full-motion video — (video)   (FMV) Any kind of video that is theoretically capable of changing the entire content on the screen fast enough that the transitions are not obvious to the human eye, i.e. about 24 times a second or more. In practise most video encoding relies on the fact that in most video there is relatively little change from one frame to the next. This allows for compression of the video data. The term is used, chiefly in computer games, in contrast to techniques such as the use of sprites that move against a more-or-less fixed background.
  • george whitefield — George, 1714–70, English Methodist evangelist.
  • grandfather clock — a pendulum floor clock having a case as tall as or taller than a person; tall-case clock; long-case clock.
  • grey-faced petrel — a dark-coloured New Zealand petrel, Pterodroma macroptera gouldi
  • gulf war syndrome — a group of symptoms occurring in some Gulf War veterans, most commonly including headache and memory loss, muscle pain, skin disorders, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and gastrointestinal and respiratory ailments, possibly caused by exposure to chemical weapons, vaccines, infectious diseases, or other factors.
Was this page helpful?
Yes No
Thank you for your feedback! Tell your friends about this page
Tell us why?