15-letter words containing f, e, n
- family business — company owned and run by a family
- family skeleton — a closely guarded family secret
- fanconi anaemia — a rare genetic disorder that can cause bone marrow failure, leukaemia, and tumours
- fantasticalness — The state or condition of being fantastical.
- fashionableness — The state of being fashionable; stylishness; elegance.
- fatal exception — (programming, operating system) A program execution error which is trapped by the operating system and which results in abrupt termination of the program. It may be possible for the program to catch some such errors, e.g. a floating point underflow; others, such as an invalid memory access (an attempt to write to read-only memory or an attempt to read memory outside of the program's address space), may always cause control to pass to the operating system without allowing the program an opportunity to handle the error. The details depend on the language's run-time system and the operating system. See also: fatal error.
- fault tolerance — (architecture) 1. The ability of a system or component to continue normal operation despite the presence of hardware or software faults. This often involves some degree of redundancy. 2. The number of faults a system or component can withstand before normal operation is impaired.
- fauntleroy suit — a formal outfit for a boy composed of a hip-length jacket and knee-length pants, often in black velvet, and a wide, lacy collar and cuffs, usually worn with a broad sash at the waist and sometimes a large, loose bow at the neck, popular in the late 19th century.
- feast or famine — characterized by alternating, extremely high and low degrees of prosperity, success, volume of business, etc.: artists who lead a feast-or-famine life.
- feast-or-famine — characterized by alternating, extremely high and low degrees of prosperity, success, volume of business, etc.: artists who lead a feast-or-famine life.
- feather banding — decorative banding of veneer or inlay having the grain laid diagonally to the grain of the principal surface.
- feeding grounds — the place where animals gather to find food
- feel one's oats — a cereal grass, Avena sativa, cultivated for its edible seed.
- feelinglessness — Lack of feeling or emotion.
- feminine ending — Prosody. an unaccented syllable at the close of a line of poetry, often one that is added to the metrical pattern as an extra syllable.
- fencepost error — 1. (Rarely "lamp-post error") A problem with the discrete equivalent of a boundary condition, often exhibited in programs by iterative loops. From the following problem: "If you build a fence 100 feet long with posts 10 feet apart, how many posts do you need?" (Either 9 or 11 is a better answer than the obvious 10). For example, suppose you have a long list or array of items, and want to process items m through n; how many items are there? The obvious answer is n - m, but that is off by one; the right answer is n - m + 1. The "obvious" formula exhibits a fencepost error. See also zeroth and note that not all off-by-one errors are fencepost errors. The game of Musical Chairs involves a catastrophic off-by-one error where N people try to sit in N - 1 chairs, but it's not a fencepost error. Fencepost errors come from counting things rather than the spaces between them, or vice versa, or by neglecting to consider whether one should count one or both ends of a row. 2. (Rare) An error induced by unexpected regularities in input values, which can (for instance) completely thwart a theoretically efficient binary tree or hash coding implementation. The error here involves the difference between expected and worst case behaviours of an algorithm.
- ferranti f100-l — (processor) A processor, with 16-bit addressing, registers and data paths and a 1-bit serial ALU. The F100-L could only access 32K of memory (one address bit was used for indirection). It was designed by a British company for the British Military. The unique feature of the F100-L was that it had a complete control bus available for a coprocessor. Any instruction the F100-L couldn't decode was sent directly to the coprocessor for processing. Applications for coprocessors at the time were limited, but the design is still used in modern processors, such as the National Semiconductor 32000 series. The disk operating system was written by Alec Cawley.
- ferrihemoglobin — methemoglobin.
- ferromolybdenum — a ferroalloy containing up to 60 percent molybdenum.
- fetal diagnosis — prenatal determination of genetic or chemical abnormalities in a fetus, esp by amniocentesis
- fetch and carry — to go and bring back; return with; get: to go up a hill to fetch a pail of water.
- feynman diagram — a network of lines that represents a series of emissions and absorptions of elementary particles by other elementary particles, from which the probability of the series can be calculated.
- field ambulance — a mobile medical unit that accepts casualties from forward units, treating the lightly wounded and stabilizing the condition of the seriously wounded before evacuating them to a hospital
- field intensity — the vector sum of all forces exerted by a field on a unit mass, unit charge, unit magnetic pole, etc., at a given point within the field.
- field of honour — the place or scene of a battle or duel, esp of jousting tournaments in medieval times
- field of vision — the entire view encompassed by the eye when it is trained in any particular direction.
- field woundwort — the plant Stachys arvensis
- fifth amendment — an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, providing chiefly that no person be required to testify against himself or herself in a criminal case and that no person be subjected to a second trial for an offense for which he or she has been duly tried previously.
- fifth dimension — a theoretical dimension beyond or in addition to a fourth dimension.
- fighter command — a former unit of the Royal Air Force dedicated to the use of fighter aircraft, esp against enemy bombers and their escorts during WWII
- fighting chance — a possibility of success following a struggle.
- fighting french — Free French.
- figurate number — a number having the property that the same number of equally spaced dots can be arranged in the shape of a regular geometrical figure.
- file management — the work of organizing and arranging files in a computer
- filemaker, inc. — (company) The company that distributes the FileMaker database. FileMaker, Inc. was previously known as Claris and was renamed after a restructuring in January 1998.
- fillister plane — an adjustable plane for cutting rabbets, grooves, etc
- finance company — an institution engaged in such specialized forms of financing as purchasing accounts receivable, extending credit to retailers and manufacturers, discounting installment contracts, and granting loans with goods as security.
- find one's feet — to become capable or confident, as in a new job
- finders keepers — whoever finds something has the right to keep it
- fine-tooth comb — a comb having narrow, closely set teeth.
- finger alphabet — a series of shapes made by the fingers that indicate letters of an alphabet and can be used in fingerspelling for the deaf
- finger painting — a jellylike paint, used chiefly by children in painting, usually with their fingers.
- finger spelling — a method of communicating with or among deaf people in which different shapes made with the fingers represent different letters of the alphabet
- finger-pointing — the imputation of blame or responsibility.
- finite automata — Finite State Machine
- fire department — the department of a municipal government charged with the prevention and extinguishing of fire.
- fire prevention — safety measures to decrease fire risk
- fire resistance — the amount of resistance of a material or construction to fire.
- fire water pond — A fire water pond is an area of water which is kept so it can be used if there is a fire.
- fire-and-forget — used to describe a type of missile that, once fired, is able to guide itself to its target