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18-letter words containing f, o, t

  • bird's-foot violet — a North American violet (Viola pedata) having divided leaves and large blue or purple flowers
  • birds of a feather — If you refer to two people as birds of a feather, you mean that they have the same interests or are very similar.
  • blanche of castile — ?1188–1252, queen consort (1223–26) of Louis VIII of France, born in Spain. The mother of Louis IX, she acted as regent during his minority (1226–36) and his absence on a crusade (1248–52)
  • bloggs family, the — An imaginary family consisting of Fred and Mary Bloggs and their children. Used as a standard example in knowledge representation to show the difference between extensional and intensional objects. For example, every occurrence of "Fred Bloggs" is the same unique person, whereas occurrences of "person" may refer to different people. Members of the Bloggs family have been known to pop up in bizarre places such as the DEC Telephone Directory. Compare Mbogo, Dr. Fred.
  • board of directors — A company's board of directors is the group of people elected by its shareholders to manage the company.
  • board of education — a group or agency with responsibility for education
  • board of elections — a bipartisan board appointed usually by local authorities and charged with control of elections and voting procedure.
  • bolt from the blue — If a piece of news comes like a bolt from the blue, it is completely unexpected and very surprising.
  • bone of contention — If a particular matter or issue is a bone of contention, it is the subject of a disagreement or argument.
  • bore the pants off — to bore extremely
  • bottom-of-the-line — being the cheapest item of its kind made by a manufacturer; produced as inexpensively as possible (opposed to top-of-the-line): bottom-of-the-line merchandise that has no warranty.
  • bounty-fed farmers — farmers who benefit from subsidies
  • branch to fishkill — (IBM: from the location of one of the corporation's facilities) Any unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. See jump off into never-never land, hyperspace.
  • branching fraction — (in branching) the proportion of the disintegrating nuclei that follow a particular branch to the total number of disintegrating nuclides
  • breach of contract — the act of breaking the conditions of a contract
  • breach of security — an act that violates a country, area, or building's security measures
  • brute force attack — (cryptography)   A method of breaking a cipher (that is, to decrypt a specific encrypted text) by trying every possible key. The quicker the brute force attack, the weaker the cipher. Feasibility of brute force attack depends on the key length of the cipher, and on the amount of computational power available to the attacker. Brute force attack is impossible against the ciphers with variable-size key, such as a one-time pad cipher.
  • california current — a cold current originating in the northern part of the Pacific Ocean, flowing SE along the coast of W North America.
  • cap of maintenance — a ceremonial cap or hat worn or carried as a symbol of office, rank, etc
  • cartilaginous fish — any fish of the class Chondrichthyes, including the sharks, skates, and rays, having a skeleton composed entirely of cartilage
  • cash-for-questions — of, involved in, or relating to a scandal in which some MPs were accused of accepting bribes to ask particular questions in Parliament
  • catherine of siena — Saint. 1347–80, Italian mystic and ascetic; patron saint of the Dominican order. Feast day: April 29
  • center of symmetry — a point within a crystal through which any straight line extends to points on opposite surfaces of the crystal at equal distances.
  • centre of pressure — the point in a body at which the resultant pressure acts when the body is immersed in a fluid
  • certification mark — a mark that certifies the origin, material, quality, mode of manufacture, accuracy, or other characteristic of a product or service: “UL” is a certification mark for appliances meeting the safety standards of Underwriters Laboratories, Inc.
  • charge of quarters — a member of the armed forces who handles administration in his or her unit, esp after duty hours
  • check verification — Check verification is a system that checks national databases of information about individuals to make sure that checks will be honored and fraud is not being committed.
  • chord of the sixth — sixth chord.
  • christian reformed — of or relating to a Protestant denomination (Christian Reformed Church) organized in the U.S. in 1857 by groups that had seceded from the Dutch Reformed Church.
  • church of scotland — the established church in Scotland, Calvinist in doctrine and Presbyterian in constitution
  • classified section — the part of a publication that contains classified advertising
  • claw-and-ball foot — ball-and-claw foot.
  • coffee-table music — unadventurous music
  • 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
  • committed facility — an agreement by a bank to provide a customer with funds up to a specified limit at a specified rate of interest
  • common data format — (library)   (CDF) A library and toolkit based on a self-describing data format for scalar and multidimensional data. CDF aims to be platform- and discipline-independent. A scientific data management package (CDF Library) allows developers to manage data and metadata through APIs. CDF has built-in support for data compression (gZip, RLE, Huffman) and files larger than two gigabytes. There are interfaces for C, FORTRAN, Java, Perl, C#, Visual Basic, IDL and MATLAB.
  • 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.
  • conditioned reflex — a reflex in which the response (e.g., secretion of saliva in a dog) is occasioned by a secondary stimulus (e.g., the ringing of a bell) repeatedly associated with the primary stimulus (e.g., the sight of meat)
  • configuration item — (jargon)   Hardware or software, or an aggregate of both, which is designated by the project configuration manager (or contracting agency) for configuration management.
  • 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.
  • continued fraction — a number plus a fraction whose denominator contains a number and a fraction whose denominator contains a number and a fraction, and so on
  • contract furniture — furniture designed and manufactured for commercial installation, as in offices, waiting rooms, or lobbies.
  • cooking facilities — equipment necessary for cooking
  • cost of goods sold — The cost of goods sold is the cost of purchasing goods for resale, added to the cost of the raw materials and labor used to manufacture goods that are sold in a particular period of time.
  • counterreformation — a reform movement to oppose a previous one
  • court of exchequer — (formerly) an English civil court where Crown revenue cases were tried
  • court of st. james — the British royal court
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