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15-letter words containing f, n, t

  • fabric softener — a substance added to fabrics during laundering to make them puffier and softer.
  • factor analysis — the use of one of several methods for reducing a set of variables to a lesser number of new variables, each of which is a function of one or more of the original variables.
  • factory chimney — a tall chimney of a factory
  • factory farming — Factory farming is a system of farming which involves keeping animals indoors, often with very little space, and giving them special foods so that they grow more quickly or produce more eggs or milk.
  • fahnestock clip — a type of terminal using a spring that clamps readily onto a connecting wire.
  • faint-heartedly — nervously
  • fair employment — the policy or practice of employing people on the basis of their capabilities only, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or disability.
  • faith community — a community of people sharing the same religious faith
  • faithworthiness — the quality of being faithworthy
  • falling weather — wet weather, as rain or snow.
  • fallopian tubes — one of a pair of long, slender ducts in the female abdomen that transport ova from the ovary to the uterus and, in fertilization, transport sperm cells from the uterus to the released ova; the oviduct of higher mammals.
  • false buckthorn — a spiny shrub or small tree, Bumelia lanuginosa, of the sapodilla family, native to the southern U.S., having gummy, milky sap and white, bell-shaped flowers and yielding a hard, light-brown wood.
  • false pretences — fraud, deception
  • false pretenses — If you do something under false pretenses, you do it when people do not know the truth about you and your intentions.
  • familiarisation — Alternative spelling of familiarization.
  • familiarization — to make (onself or another) well-acquainted or conversant with something.
  • family skeleton — a closely guarded family secret
  • fantasmagorical — Alternative form of phantasmagorical.
  • fantasticalness — The state or condition of being fantastical.
  • fast-food chain — a chain of restaurants serving fast food
  • 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.
  • feel one's oats — a cereal grass, Avena sativa, cultivated for its edible seed.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 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 columnist — A fifth columnist is someone who secretly supports and helps the enemies of the country or organization they are in.
  • fifth dimension — a theoretical dimension beyond or in addition to a fourth dimension.
  • fight windmills — to fight imaginary evils or opponents
  • 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.
  • fighting spirit — courage and determination expressed in a willingness to fight or struggle
  • 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
  • filling station — service station (def 1).
  • fillister plane — an adjustable plane for cutting rabbets, grooves, etc
  • find one's feet — to become capable or confident, as in a new job
  • 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-pointing — the imputation of blame or responsibility.
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