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18-letter words containing f, e, s, t

  • college of justice — the official name for the Scottish Court of Session; the supreme court of Scotland
  • comb-footed spider — any of numerous spiders constituting the family Theridiidae, having a comblike row of bristles on the tarsi of the hind legs.
  • combustion furnace — a furnace used in the laboratory to carry out elemental analysis of organic compounds
  • compassion fatigue — the inability to react sympathetically to a crisis, disaster, etc, because of overexposure to previous crises, disasters, etc
  • composite function — a function obtained from two given functions, where the range of one function is contained in the domain of the second function, by assigning to an element in the domain of the first function that element in the range of the second function whose inverse image is the image of the element.
  • constructive proof — (mathematics)   A proof that something exists that provides an example or a method for actually constructing it. For example, for any pair of finite real numbers n < 0 and p > 0, there exists a real number 0 < k < 1 such that f(k) = (1-k)*n + k*p = 0. A constructive proof would proceed by rearranging the above to derive an equation for k: k = 1/(1-n/p) From this and the constraints on n and p, we can show that 0 < k < 1. A few mathematicians actually reject *all* non-constructive arguments as invalid; this means, for instance, that the law of the excluded middle (either P or not-P must hold, whatever P is) has to go; this makes proof by contradiction invalid. See intuitionistic logic. Constructive proofs are popular in theoretical computer science, both because computer scientists are less given to abstraction than mathematicians and because intuitionistic logic turns out to be an appropriate theoretical treatment of the foundations of computer science.
  • cooking facilities — equipment necessary for cooking
  • court of st. james — the British royal court
  • creeping featurism — (jargon)   /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ (Or "feature creep") A systematic tendency to load more chrome and features onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed. "The main problem with BSD Unix has always been creeping featurism." More generally, creeping featurism is the tendency for anything to become more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had this feature too". The result is usually a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone, and then another, and another, .... When creeping featurism gets out of hand, it's like a cancer. Usually this term is used to describe computer programs, but it could also be said of the federal government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A similar phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious redesigns; see second-system effect. See also creeping elegance.
  • crested flycatcher — any of various tyrant flycatchers (esp. genus Myiarchus) with a prominent crest
  • crocodile-infested — full of crocodiles
  • curvature of space — (in relativity) a property of space near massive bodies in which their gravitational field causes light to travel along curved paths.
  • data transfer rate — (communications)   (Or "throughput, data rate", "transmission rate") The amount of data transferred in one direction over a link divided by the time taken to transfer it, usually expressed in bits per second (bps), bytes per second (Bps) or baud. The link may be anything from an interface to a hard disk to a radio transmission from a satellite. Where data transfer is not continuous throughout the given time interval, the data transfer rate is thus an average rate that will be lower than the peak rate. The peak or maximum possible rate may itself be lower than the capacity of the communication channel if the channel is shared, or part of the signal is not considered as data, e.g. checksum or routing information. When applied to data rate, the multiplier prefixes "kilo-", "mega-", "giga-", etc. (and their abbreviations, "k", "M", "G", etc.) always denote powers of 1000. For example, 64 kbps is 64,000 bits per second. This contrasts with units of storage where they stand for powers of 1024, e.g. 1 KB = 1024 bytes. The other important characteristic of a channel is its latency. The bandwidth of a channel determines the data transfer rate but is a different characteristic, measured in Hertz. [Relationship?]
  • defense calculator — IBM 701
  • depth-first search — (algorithm)   A graph search algorithm which extends the current path as far as possible before backtracking to the last choice point and trying the next alternative path. Depth-first search may fail to find a solution if it enters a cycle in the graph. This can be avoided if we never extend a path to a node which it already contains. Opposite of breadth first search. See also iterative deepening.
  • dimethyl sulfoxide — DMSO.
  • disenfranchisement — to disfranchise.
  • disidentifications — Plural form of disidentification.
  • distress frequency — a radio frequency band reserved for emergency signals from aircraft or ships in distress.
  • distributed eiffel — ["Distributed Eiffel: A Language for Programming Multi-Granular Distributed Objects on the Clouds Operating System", L. Gunaseelan et al, IEEE Conf Comp Langs, 1992].
  • do oneself justice — If you do yourself justice, you do something as well as you are capable of doing it.
  • duty-free shopping — the making of duty-free purchases
  • dwarf storage unit — (humour)   (DSU) An IBM term for a cupboard.
  • dysfunctionalities — Plural form of dysfunctionality.
  • eleanor of castile — 1246–90, Spanish wife of Edward I of England. Eleanor Crosses were erected at each place at which her body rested between Nottingham, where she died, and London, where she is buried
  • essence of violets — an alcoholic solution derived from violets, used as perfume
  • excess profits tax — a tax on profits exceeding a certain amount
  • fall on one's feet — a plural of foot.
  • fallot's tetralogy — a congenital heart disease in which there are four defects: pulmonary stenosis, enlarged right ventricle, a ventricular septal defect, and an aorta whose origin lies over the septal defect. In babies suffering this disease the defects can be corrected by surgery
  • false imprisonment — the unlawful restraint of a person from exercising the right to freedom of movement.
  • family-size packet — a packet large enough to be suitable for a family
  • fantasy basketball — imagination, especially when extravagant and unrestrained.
  • far eastern region — former name of Khabarovsk.
  • farewell-to-spring — a slender, showy plant, Clarkia amoena, of the evening primrose family, native to western North America, having satiny, cup-shaped, lilac-crimson or reddish-pink flowers and roundish fruit.
  • feast of orthodoxy — a solemn festival held on the first Sunday of Lent (Orthodoxy Sunday) commemorating the restoration of the use of icons in the church (a.d. 842) and the triumph over all heresies.
  • feather one's nest — one of the horny structures forming the principal covering of birds, consisting typically of a hard, tubular portion attached to the body and tapering into a thinner, stemlike portion bearing a series of slender, barbed processes that interlock to form a flat structure on each side.
  • federal funds rate — The federal funds rate is the overnight rate between banks.
  • feeping creaturism — /fee'ping kree"ch*r-izm/ A deliberate spoonerism for creeping featurism, meant to imply that the system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of hacks. This term isn"t really well defined, but it sounds so neat that most hackers have said or heard it. It is probably reinforced by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their customary noises.
  • fehling's solution — a blue solution of copper sulfate, Rochelle salt, and sodium hydroxide, used to test for the presence of a sugar, aldehyde, etc.
  • feldenkrais method — a system of gentle movements that promote flexibility, coordination, and self-awareness
  • fermat's last post — (humour)   A post to a bug tracker, mailing list or forum in which the author claims to have found a simple fix or workaround for a bug, but never says what it is and never shows up again to explain it (even after others have been puzzling over the bug for years).
  • fermat's principle — Optics. the law that the path taken by a ray of light in going from one point to another point will be the path that requires the least time.
  • field of quotients — a field whose elements are pairs of elements of a given commutative integral domain such that the second element of each pair is not zero. The field of rational numbers is the field of quotients of the integral domain of integers.
  • filename extension — (filename extension)   The portion of a filename, following the final point, which indicates the kind of data stored in the file - the file type. Many operating systems use filename extensions, e.g. Unix, VMS, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows. They are usually from one to three letters (some sad old OSes support no more than three). Examples include "c" for C source code, "ps" for PostScript, "txt" for arbitrary text. Apart from informing the user what type of content the file holds, filename extensions are typically used to decide which program to launch when a file is "run", e.g. by double-clicking it in a GUI file browser. They are also used by Unix's make to determine how to build one kind of file from another. Compare: MIME type.
  • finite-dimensional — (of a vector space) having a basis consisting of a finite number of elements.
  • fire and brimstone — When people talk about fire and brimstone, they are referring to hell and how they think people are punished there after death.
  • fire-and-brimstone — threatening punishment in the hereafter: a fire-and-brimstone sermon.
  • first and foremost — primarily
  • first class module — (programming)   A module that is a first class data object of the programming language, e.g. a record containing functions. In a functional language, it is standard to have first class programs, so program building blocks can have the same status.
  • first duke of york — a member of the royal house of England that ruled from 1461 to 1485.
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