24-letter words containing f, e, s, t, o, n
- to fight a losing battle — If you are fighting a losing battle, you are trying to achieve something but are not going to be successful.
- to go for the brass ring — to try to succeed in an area where there is a lot of competition
- to set fire to something — If you set fire to something or if you set it on fire, you start it burning in order to damage or destroy it.
- to speak well of someone — If you speak well of someone or speak highly of someone, you say good things about them. If you speak ill of someone, you criticize them.
- to tie yourself in knots — If you tie yourself in knots, you get very confused and anxious.
- tools of one's/the trade — The tools of your trade or the tools of the trade are the skills, instruments, and other equipment that you need in order to do your job properly.
- trading standards office — an office of the local authority department that deals with trading standards
- tug/touch one's forelock — If you say that a person tugs their forelock to another person, you are criticizing them for showing too much respect to the second person or being unnecessarily worried about their opinions.
- twenty-four-hour service — a banking service that is always available
- under the sway of sb/sth — If you are under the sway of someone or something, they have great influence over you.
- under-secretary of state — any of various high officials subordinate only to the minister in charge of a department
- uniform resource locater — Uniform Resource Locator
- uniform resource locator — (web) (URL, previously "Universal") A standard way of specifying the location of an object, typically a web page, on the Internet. Other types of object are described below. URLs are the form of address used on the World-Wide Web. They are used in HTML documents to specify the target of a hypertext link which is often another HTML document (possibly stored on another computer). Here are some example URLs: http://w3.org/default.html http://acme.co.uk:8080/images/map.gif http://foldoc.org/?Uniform+Resource+Locator http://w3.org/default.html#Introduction ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/mirrors/msdos/graphics/gifkit.zip ftp://spy:[email protected]/pub/topsecret/weapon.tgz mailto:[email protected] news:alt.hypertext telnet://dra.com The part before the first colon specifies the access scheme or protocol. Commonly implemented schemes include: ftp, http (web), gopher or WAIS. The "file" scheme should only be used to refer to a file on the same host. Other less commonly used schemes include news, telnet or mailto (e-mail). The part after the colon is interpreted according to the access scheme. In general, two slashes after the colon introduce a hostname (host:port is also valid, or for FTP user:[email protected] or [email protected]). The port number is usually omitted and defaults to the standard port for the scheme, e.g. port 80 for HTTP. For an HTTP or FTP URL the next part is a pathname which is usually related to the pathname of a file on the server. The file can contain any type of data but only certain types are interpreted directly by most browsers. These include HTML and images in gif or jpeg format. The file's type is given by a MIME type in the HTTP headers returned by the server, e.g. "text/html", "image/gif", and is usually also indicated by its filename extension. A file whose type is not recognised directly by the browser may be passed to an external "viewer" application, e.g. a sound player. The last (optional) part of the URL may be a query string preceded by "?" or a "fragment identifier" preceded by "#". The later indicates a particular position within the specified document. Only alphanumerics, reserved characters (:/?#"<>%+) used for their reserved purposes and "$", "-", "_", ".", "&", "+" are safe and may be transmitted unencoded. Other characters are encoded as a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits. Space may also be encoded as "+". Standard SGML "&
;" character entity encodings (e.g. "é") are also accepted when URLs are embedded in HTML. The terminating semicolon may be omitted if & is followed by a non-letter character. - united states of america — United States. Abbreviation: U.S.A., USA.
- veterans of foreign wars — an organization of U.S. veterans who have served in foreign wars: founded in 1899
- volume table of contents — (storage) (VTOC) /V-tock/ A special file on a disk, which contains a list of all the ordinary files on the disk and their addresses. Also called a directory. The term is used mostly with large mainframe disk drives. Storage administrators will often refer to the VTOC to obtain information on the number of files stored on a disk.
- water of crystallization — water of hydration, formerly thought necessary to crystallization: now usually regarded as affecting crystallization only as it forms new molecular combinations.
- wolf in sheep's clothing — any of several large carnivorous mammals of the genus Canis, of the dog family Canidae, especially C. lupus, usually hunting in packs, formerly common throughout the Northern Hemisphere but now chiefly restricted to the more unpopulated parts of its range.