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21-letter words containing f, l, a, t, r

  • fort lesley j. mcnair — a military reservation in SW Washington, D.C., on the Potomac River, SW of the Capitol.
  • forward compatibility — (jargon)   The ability to accept input from later versions of itself. Forward compatibility is harder to achieve than backward compatibility, since, in the backward case, the input format is know whereas a forward compatible system needs to cope gracefully with unknown future features. An example of future compatibility is the stipulation that a web browser should ignore HTML tags it does not recognise. See also extensible.
  • fractional extraction — Fractional extraction is a process of extracting a liquid from a liquid, in which two solutes are separated, with one leaving in the extract and one in the raffinate.
  • franco-belgian system — French system.
  • fraudulent conversion — conversion committed with the intent to defraud
  • free-floating anxiety — chronic anxiety occurring for no identifiable cause
  • 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.
  • functional illiterate — a person with some basic education who still falls short of a minimum standard of literacy or whose reading and writing skills are inadequate to everyday needs.
  • functional imperative — a requirement for the survival of any social system, as communication, control of conflict, or socialization.
  • fundamental frequency — the lowest frequency at which a medium will freely oscillate.
  • general of the armies — a special rank held by John J. Pershing, equivalent to general of the army.
  • gentleman of the road — a highwayman.
  • glen of imaal terrier — a strongly-built medium-sized variety of terrier with a medium-length coat and short forelegs
  • grammatical inference — Deducing a grammar from given examples. Also known as "inductive inference" and recently as "computational learning".
  • 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
  • in (or out of) place — in (or out of) the customary, proper, or assigned place
  • infant mortality rate — number of babies dying
  • infant welfare clinic — a medical facility that specializes in the health and well-being of young babies
  • infectious ectromelia — ectromelia (def 2).
  • infertility treatment — treatment aimed at helping a couple conceive
  • infiltration capacity — the maximum rate at which a soil in a given condition will absorb water.
  • inflationary universe — a version of the big bang theory in which the universe underwent very rapid growth during the first fraction of a second before it settled down to its current rate of expansion.
  • information appliance — (hardware)   (IA) A consumer device that performs only a few targeted tasks and is controlled by a simple touch-screen interface or push buttons on the device's enclosure.
  • information retrieval — the systematic storage and recovery of data, as from a file, card catalog, or the memory bank of a computer. Abbreviation: IR.
  • isolation transformer — An isolation transformer is a transformer with physically separate primary and secondary windings, that prevent it from transferring unwanted noise from the input circuit to the output windings.
  • joseph bonaparte gulf — an inlet of the Timor Sea in N Australia. Width: 360 km (225 miles)
  • lafayette, marquis de — Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier [ma-ree zhaw-zef pawl eev rawk zheel-ber dy maw-tyey] /maˈri ʒɔˈzɛf pɔl iv rɔk ʒilˈbɛr dü mɔˈtyeɪ/ (Show IPA), Marquis de. Also, La Fayette. 1757–1834, French soldier, statesman, and liberal leader, who served in the American Revolutionary Army as aide-de-camp to General Washington, and took a leading part in the French revolutions of 1789 and 1830.
  • lafcadio's adventures — French Les Caves du Vatican. a novel (1914) by André Gide.
  • lateral magnification — the ratio of the height of the image to the height of the object in a lens or other optical system.
  • 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)
  • league of arab states — Arab League.
  • leaning tower of pisa — a round, marble campanile in Pisa, Italy, begun in 1174 and now 17 feet (5.2 meters) out of the perpendicular in its height of 179 feet (54 meters).
  • learning difficulties — difficulty experienced in reaching the average standard of people of the same age group as regards intellectual and cognitive skills and performance
  • lender of last resort — the central bank of a country with authority for controlling its banking system
  • linear transformation — linear map
  • liquefied natural gas — a mixture of various gases, esp methane, liquefied under pressure for transportation and used as an engine fuel
  • 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.
  • magnetocaloric effect — an increase or decrease of the temperature of a thermally isolated magnetic substance accompanying an increase or decrease in the intensity of a magnetic field.
  • magnificent riflebird — a bird of paradise, Craspedophora magnifica
  • make up for lost time — compensate for past inaction
  • make yourself at home — settle in
  • 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.
  • multiplication factor — the ratio of the number of neutrons in a generation to the number of neutrons in the previous generation: when the multiplication factor is equal to or greater than one, a chain reaction is possible
  • myocardial infarction — heart attack. Abbreviation: MI.
  • 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.
  • nitrosylsulfuric acid — a clear, straw-colored, oily, corrosive liquid, HNO 5 S, used chiefly in the manufacture of dyes.
  • open telecom platform — (communications, library)   (OTP) A set of standard, open source libraries and tools for use with Erlang.
  • operational amplifier — a high-gain, high-input impedance amplifier, usually an integrated circuit, that can perform mathematical operations when suitably wired.
  • partial reinforcement — the process of randomly rewarding an organism for making a response on only some of the occasions it makes it
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