21-letter words containing f, o, i
- ground-effect machine — ACV (def 2).
- 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.
- hildegard (of bingen) — Saint(1098-1179); Ger. nun, composer, & mystic: her day is Sept. 17
- host command facility — (operating system) (HCF) Used to access IBM S/36 and AS/400 computers from a mainframe.
- house of prostitution — a brothel.
- hubble classification — a method of classifying galaxies depending on whether they are elliptical, spiral, barred spiral, or irregular
- identification papers — documents that serve to establish someone's identity
- identification parade — a group of persons including one suspected of having committed a crime assembled for the purpose of discovering whether a witness can identify the suspect
- illinois bundleflower — a warm-season perennial, Desmanthus illinoensis, having small brown legumes and fernlike leaves, native to North American prairies, glades, and pastures.
- imperfect competition — economics: when sb has excessive influence on market price
- in (or out of) order — in (or not in) proper sequence or position
- in (or out of) phase — in (or not in) a state of exactly parallel movements, oscillations, etc.; in (or not in) synchronization
- in (or out of) place — in (or out of) the customary, proper, or assigned place
- in a class of its own — unequalled; unparalleled
- in a state of undress — If someone is in a state of undress, they do not have all their clothes on.
- in favor/out of favor — If someone or something is in favor, people like or support them. If they are out of favor, people no longer like or support them.
- 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 stock/out of stock — If goods are in stock, a shop has them available to sell. If they are out of stock, it does not.
- in the course of time — eventually
- in touch/out of touch — If you are in touch with a subject or situation, or if someone keeps you in touch with it, you know the latest news or information about it. If you are out of touch with it, you do not know the latest news or information about it.
- infant mortality rate — number of babies dying
- infectious ectromelia — ectromelia (def 2).
- 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 gathering — the process of collecting information about something
- information retrieval — the systematic storage and recovery of data, as from a file, card catalog, or the memory bank of a computer. Abbreviation: IR.
- information scientist — someone who works in information science
- 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.
- 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.
- just a bunch of disks — (jargon, storage) (JBOD, or "Just a Bunch of Drives") A storage subsystems using multiple independent disk drives, as opposed to one form of RAID or another. For example, Unisys open storage provides JBOD in both SCSI and fibre channel interfaces.
- knights of st columba — an international, semi-secret fraternal and charitable order for Catholic laymen, which originated in New Haven, Connecticut in 1882 (the Knights of Columbus)
- knock someone for six — to upset or overwhelm someone completely; stun
- korsakoff's psychosis — a mental illness involving severe confusion and inability to retain recent memories, usually caused by alcoholism
- lady of the camellias — French La Dame aux Camélias. a novel (1848) and play (1852) by Alexandre Dumas fils.
- 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)
- 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).
- level of significance — significance level.
- line of communication — a means by which information may be transmitted from one person to another
- linear transformation — linear map
- 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.
- luminous flux density — luminous flux per unit of cross-sectional area.
- 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.