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

  • darwinian-fitness — health.
  • david copperfield — a novel (1850) by Charles Dickens.
  • de facto standard — A widespread consensus on a particular product or protocol which has not been ratified by any official standards body, such as ISO, but which nevertheless has a large market share. The archetypal example of a de facto standard is the IBM PC which, despite is many glaring technical deficiencies, has gained such a large share of the personal computer market that it is now popular simply because it is popular and therefore enjoys fierce competition in pricing and software development.
  • death certificate — A death certificate is an official certificate signed by a doctor which states the cause of a person's death.
  • dedifferentiating — Present participle of dedifferentiate.
  • dedifferentiation — the reversion of the cells of differentiated tissue to a less specialized form
  • deep-frozen foods — foodstuffs that have been frozen for storage
  • defamiliarisation — (arts) The representation of objects anew, in a way that we do not recognize, or that changes our reading of them.
  • defamiliarization — Art, Literature. a theory and technique, originating in the early 20th century, in which an artistic or literary work presents familiar objects or situations in an unfamiliar way, prolonging the perceptive process and allowing for a fresh perspective.
  • defence secretary — the member of a government who is responsible for the country's armed forces
  • deferred sentence — a sentence that is postponed for a specific period to allow a court to examine the conduct of the offender during the deferment
  • definite integral — the evaluation of the indefinite integral between two limits, representing the area between the given function and the x-axis between these two values of x
  • degree of freedom — one of the minimum number of parameters necessary to describe a state or property of a system
  • denial of service — a deliberate interruption in access to a computer system or network, esp by using multiple computers to generate an unmanageable volume of traffic (distributed denial of service)
  • denial-of-service — pertaining to or being an incident in which a computer or computer network is disabled, disrupting access or service: a website hit by a denial-of-service attack; unintentional denial-of-service problems.
  • deprofessionalise — to remove from professional control, influence, manipulation, etc.
  • deprofessionalize — to remove from professional control, influence, manipulation, etc.
  • difference engine — (computer, history)   Charles Babbage's design for the first automatic mechanical calculator. The Difference Engine was a special purpose device intended for the production of mathematical tables. Babbage started work on the Difference Engine in 1823 with funding from the British Government. Only one-seventh of the complete engine, about 2000 parts, was built in 1832 by Babbage's engineer, Joseph Clement. This was demonstrated successfully by Babbage and still works perfectly. The engine was never completed and most of the 12,000 parts manufactured were later melted for scrap. It was left to Georg and Edvard Schuetz to construct the first working devices to the same design which were successful in limited applications. The Difference Engine No. 2 was finally completed in 1991 at the Science Museum, London, UK and is on display there. The engine used gears to compute cumulative sums in a series of registers: r[i] := r[i] + r[i+1]. However, the addition had the side effect of zeroing r[i+1]. Babbage overcame this by simultaneously copying r[i+1] to a temporary register during the addition and then copying it back to r[i+1] at the end of each cycle (each turn of a handle).
  • differentiability — The ability to be differentiated.
  • differential gear — differential (def 7).
  • differential line — (hardware)   A kind of electrical connection using two wires, one of which carries the normal signal (V) and the other carries an inverted version the signal (-V). A differential amplifier at the receiver subtracts the inverted signal from the normal signal to yield a signal proportional to V. This subtraction is intended to cancel out any noise induced in the wires, on the assmption that the same level of noise will have been induced in both wires. Twisted pair wiring is often used to try to ensure that this is the case. The two wires might be connected at the receiver to separate analogue to digital converters and the subtraction performed digitally. The RS-422 serial line standard specifies differential drivers and receivers, whereas the earlier RS-232 standard does not. Opposite: single ended.
  • differential rate — a special lower rate, as one charged by one of two or more competing businesses.
  • differential tone — a musical sound sometimes heard when two loud notes are sounded together, lower in pitch than either
  • dimethylformamide — a colourless liquid widely used as a solvent and sometimes as a catalyst. Formula: (CH3)2NCHO
  • director of music — a person in charge of musical training and performance at an institution such as a college, especially the head bandmaster of a military band
  • disrespectfulness — The state or quality of being disrespectful; disrespect; disregard.
  • distributed force — A distributed force is a force that acts on a large part of a surface, not just on one place.
  • double quatrefoil — a charge having the form of a foil with eight leaves, used especially as the cadency mark of a ninth son.
  • double refraction — the separation of a ray of light into two unequally refracted, plane-polarized rays of orthogonal polarizations, occurring in crystals in which the velocity of light rays is not the same in all directions.
  • drained of colour — colourless
  • dress-down friday — In some companies employees are allowed to wear clothes that are less smart than usual on a Friday. This day is known as a dress-down Friday.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • ends of the earth — remote regions
  • enforcement order — an order by a court to force a person or organization to comply with a regulation or law
  • error of judgment — a wrong or bad decision
  • facts and figures — details; precise information
  • fade in (or out) — to appear or cause to appear (or disappear) gradually; make or become more (or less) distinct
  • faint-heartedness — lack of courage
  • fairness doctrine — a policy mandated by the Federal Communications Commission, requiring radio and television stations to grant equal time to a political candidate, group, etc., to present an opposing viewpoint to one already aired.
  • 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.
  • fancy dress party — a party at which the guests wear fancy dress
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