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21-letter words containing f, e, t, h

  • friends with benefits — friends who have a casual sexual relationship with no expectation of commitment
  • from dan to beersheba — from one end of Israel to the other: Judg. 20:1
  • full faith and credit — the obligation under Article IV of the U.S. Constitution for each state to recognize the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.
  • general of the armies — a special rank held by John J. Pershing, equivalent to general of the army.
  • gentleman of the road — a highwayman.
  • get into the swing of — If you get into the swing of something, you become very involved in it and enjoy what you are doing.
  • get/have the hots for — If you say that one person has the hots for another, you mean that they feel a strong sexual attraction to that person.
  • ground-effect machine — ACV (def 2).
  • have heard sth before — If you say that you have heard something before, you mean that you are not interested in it, or do not believe it, or are not surprised about it, because you already know about it or have experienced it.
  • have the advantage of — benefit from: sth extra
  • hay-pauncefote treaty — an agreement (1901) between the U.S. and Great Britain giving the U.S. the sole right to build a canal across Central America connecting the Atlantic and Pacific.
  • high court of justice — an English court formed in 1873 from several superior courts and consisting of a court of original jurisdiction (High Court of Justice) and an appellate court (Court of Appeal)
  • higher-order function — (HOF) A function that can take one or more functions as argument and/or return a function as its value. E.g. map in (map f l) which returns the list of results of applying function f to each of the elements of list l. See also curried function.
  • highest common factor — greatest common divisor. Abbreviation: H.C.F.
  • horns and halo effect — a tendency to allow one's judgement of another person, esp in a job interview, to be unduly influenced by an unfavourable (horns) or favourable (halo) first impression based on appearances
  • house of prostitution — a brothel.
  • hubble classification — a method of classifying galaxies depending on whether they are elliptical, spiral, barred spiral, or irregular
  • in (or out of) phase — in (or not in) a state of exactly parallel movements, oscillations, etc.; in (or not in) synchronization
  • in phase/out of phase — If two things are out of phase with each other, they are not working or happening together as they should. If two things are in phase, they are working or occurring together as they should.
  • in the course of time — eventually
  • in the first instance — You say in the first instance to mention something that is the first step in a series of actions.
  • information gathering — the process of collecting information about something
  • joint chiefs of staff — the chiefs of staff of the army and the air force, the commandant of the marine corps, and the chief of naval operations, together with a chairman selected from one of the branches of the armed forces, serving as the principal military advisory body to the president, the National Security Council, and the secretary of defense.
  • joseph bonaparte gulf — an inlet of the Timor Sea in N Australia. Width: 360 km (225 miles)
  • lady of the camellias — French La Dame aux Camélias. a novel (1848) and play (1852) by Alexandre Dumas fils.
  • law of thermodynamics — any of three principles variously stated in equivalent forms, being the principle that the change of energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the heat transferred minus the work done (first law of thermodynamics) the principle that no cyclic process is possible in which heat is absorbed from a reservoir at a single temperature and converted completely into mechanical work (second law of thermodynamics) and the principle that it is impossible to reduce the temperature of a system to absolute zero in a finite number of operations (third law of thermodynamics)
  • live high off the hog — a hoofed mammal of the family Suidae, order Artiodactyla, comprising boars and swine.
  • live life to the full — If you say that someone lives life to the full, you mean that they try to gain a lot from life by being always busy and trying new activities.
  • lordship of the isles — an overlordship of the Western Isles of Scotland and adjacent lands instituted in 1266 when Magnus of Norway ceded the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, and Kintyre to the King of Scotland, and claimed by the chiefs of Clan Dougall and later by those of Clan Donald. The title was forfeited to James IV in 1493 and is now held by the eldest son of the sovereign
  • lost in the underflow — (jargon)   Too small to be worth considering; more specifically, small beyond the limits of accuracy or measurement. This is a reference to "floating point underflow". The Hacker's Jargon File claimed that it is also a pun on "undertow" (a kind of fast, cold current that sometimes runs just offshore and can be dangerous to swimmers). "Well, sure, photon pressure from the stadium lights alters the path of a thrown baseball, but that effect gets lost in the underflow". Compare epsilon, epsilon squared; see also overflow bit.
  • lotus of the good law — Saddharma-Pundarika.
  • lotus-of-the-true-law — a Mahayana sutra, forming with its references to Amida and the Bodhisattvas the basis for the doctrine that there is something of Buddha in everyone, so that salvation is universally available: a central text of Mahayana Buddhism.
  • lower the tone of sth — If you say that something lowers the tone of a place or event, you mean that it is not appropriate and makes the place or event seem less respectable.
  • lull before the storm — If you describe a situation as the lull before the storm, you mean that although it is calm now, there is going to be trouble in the future.
  • macintosh file system — (file system)   A file on the Macintosh consists of two parts, called forks. The "data fork" contains the data which would normally be stored in the file on other operating systems. The "resource fork" contains a collection of arbitrary attribute/value pairs, including program segments, icon bitmaps, and parametric values. Yet more information regarding Macintosh files is stored by the Finder in a hidden file, called the "Desktop Database". Because of the complications in storing different parts of a Macintosh file in non-Macintosh file systems that only handle consecutive data in one part, it is common to only send the Data fork or to convert the Macintosh file into some other format before transferring it.
  • make heavy weather of — to create needless difficulties in dealing with
  • make yourself at home — settle in
  • member of the wedding — a novel (1946) and play (1950) by Carson McCullers.
  • minister of the crown — any Government minister of cabinet rank
  • mistress of the robes — (in Britain) a lady of high rank in charge of the Queen's wardrobe
  • mother-of-pearl cloud — nacreous cloud.
  • mother-of-pearl glass — an American art glassware having colored glass set into indentations in a thickness of opaque glass, the whole covered with clear glass and etched slightly with acid.
  • neither fish nor fowl — any of various cold-blooded, aquatic vertebrates, having gills, commonly fins, and typically an elongated body covered with scales.
  • nightmare file system — Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher spl level). Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the entire network of machines is frozen - worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great misfeature). ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s. See also broadcast storm.
  • no smoke without fire — the evidence strongly suggests something has indeed happened
  • north pacific current — a warm current flowing eastward across the Pacific Ocean.
  • of time and the river — a novel (1935) by Thomas Wolfe.
  • one foot in the grave — near to death
  • one-way hash function — (algorithm)   (Or "message digest function") A one-way function which takes a variable-length message and produces a fixed-length hash. Given the hash it is computationally infeasible to find a message with that hash; in fact one can't determine any usable information about a message with that hash, not even a single bit. For some one-way hash functions it's also computationally impossible to determine two messages which produce the same hash. A one-way hash function can be private or public, just like an encryption function. MD5, SHA and Snefru are examples of public one-way hash functions. A public one-way hash function can be used to speed up a public-key digital signature system. Rather than sign a long message, which can take a long time, compute the one-way hash of the message, and sign the hash.
  • pacific daylight time — the version of Pacific Standard Time that is in use when daylight saving time is being observed
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