13-letter words containing f, e, l, u
- finite clause — a clause with a finite verb in its predicate.
- first refusal — If someone has first refusal on something that is being sold or offered, they have the right to decide whether or not to buy it or take it before it is offered to anyone else.
- flag of truce — a white flag displayed as an invitation to the enemy to confer, or carried as a sign of peaceful intention by one sent to deal with the enemy.
- flame cutting — a method of cutting ferrous metals in which the metal is heated by a torch to about 800°C and is oxidized by a stream of oxygen from the torch
- flannel-mouth — a person whose speech is thick, slow, or halting.
- flash picture — a photograph made using flash photography.
- flatbed truck — a truck with a flat platform for its body
- flight number — the identifying number of a scheduled flight
- floatcut file — file with rows of parallel teeth
- floor furnace — a small self-contained furnace placed just below the floor of the space to be heated.
- flugelhornist — One who plays the flugelhorn.
- fluid-extract — a liquid preparation, containing alcohol as a solvent or as a preservative, that contains in each cubic centimeter the medicinal activity of one gram of the crude drug in powdered form.
- fluidized bed — a bed of fluidized solids used as a heat exchanger or mass transfer medium
- flunitrazepam — a powerful benzodiazepine sedative, C 16 H 12 FN 3 O 3 , that causes semiconsciousness and memory blackouts: has been implicated in date rapes and is illegal in the U.S.
- fluophosphate — fluorophosphate.
- fluorescently — In a fluorescent manner; using fluorescence.
- fluoroacetate — a toxic chemical compound, C2H2FNaO2, occurring naturally in certain plants, and commonly used as rat poison
- fluorochromes — Plural form of fluorochrome.
- fluorohydride — (inorganic chemistry) An compound formed by the addition of the elements of hydrogen fluoride.
- flutter wheel — a waterwheel at the bottom of a chute, turned by the falling water.
- flutterboards — Plural form of flutterboard.
- flying saucer — any of various disk-shaped objects allegedly seen flying at high speeds and altitudes, often with extreme changes in speed and direction, and thought by some to be manned by intelligent beings from outer space.
- fn tunnelling — Fowler-Nordheim tunnelling
- focal seizure — an epileptic manifestation arising from a localized anomaly in the brain, as a small tumor or scar, and usually involving a single motor or sensory mechanism but occasionally spreading to other areas and causing convulsions and loss of consciousness.
- foldoc source — The source text of FOLDOC is a single plain text file. FOLDOC is also available on paper from your local printer but, at 700,000+ words, that would be about 2000 pages.
- fontainebleau — a town in N France, SE of Paris: famous palace, long a favorite residence of French kings; extensive forest.
- food supplies — food obtained for a household or for a country, an expedition, etc
- for values of — (jargon) A common rhetorical maneuver at MIT is to use any of the canonical random numbers as placeholders for variables. "The max function takes 42 arguments, for arbitrary values of 42". "There are 69 ways to leave your lover, for 69 = 50". This is especially likely when the speaker has uttered a random number and realises that it was not recognised as such, but even "non-random" numbers are occasionally used in this fashion. A related joke is that pi equals 3 - for small values of pi and large values of 3. This usage probably derives from the programming language MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder), an ALGOL-like language that was the most common choice among mainstream (non-hacker) users at MIT in the mid-1960s. It had a control structure FOR VALUES OF X = 3, 7, 99 DO ... that would repeat the indicated instructions for each value in the list (unlike the usual FOR that generates an arithmetic sequence of values). MAD is long extinct, but similar for-constructs still flourish (e.g. in Unix's shell languages).
- forced labour — labour done because of force; compulsory labour
- forgetfulness — apt to forget; that forgets: a forgetful person.
- fork luncheon — déjeuner à la fourchette.
- fort moultrie — William, 1730–1805, U.S. general.
- fortuneteller — a person who claims the ability to predict the future.
- fossiliferous — bearing or containing fossils, as rocks or strata.
- foul-smelling — having a very unpleasant smell
- foul-tempered — frequently and unnecessarily sullen or angry
- four-wheeling — traveling in a vehicle using four-wheel drive.
- foursome reel — a lively Scottish dance for two couples who combine in square and circular formations
- frelinghuysen — Frederick Theodore, 1817–85, U.S. statesman.
- freudian slip — (in Freudian psychology) an inadvertent mistake in speech or writing that is thought to reveal a person's unconscious motives, wishes, or attitudes.
- frightfulness — The quality of being frightful.
- frivolousness — characterized by lack of seriousness or sense: frivolous conduct.
- fruitlessness — The quality of being fruitless.
- fuddle-duddle — to depart; be off.
- fuel air bomb — a type of bomb that spreads a cloud of gas, which is then detonated, over the target area, causing extensive destruction
- fuel injector — injector (def 2b).
- fuel-injected — (of an engine) having fuel injection.
- fulani empire — a powerful W African Muslim state that flourished in the 19th century in the area of present-day Nigeria.
- full laziness — (functional programming) A transformation, described by Wadsworth in 1971, which ensures that subexpressions in a function body which do not depend on the function's arguments are only evaluated once. E.g. each time the function f x = x + sqrt 4 is applied, (sqrt 4) will be evaluated. Since (sqrt 4) does not depend on x, we could transform this to: f x = x + sqrt4 sqrt4 = sqrt 4 We have replaced the dynamically created (sqrt 4) with a single shared constant which, in a graph reduction system, will be evaluated the first time it is needed and then updated with its value. See also fully lazy lambda lifting, let floating.
- full of beans — the edible nutritious seed of various plants of the legume family, especially of the genus Phaseolus.