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19-letter words containing f, u, s, e

  • finger on the pulse — If you have your finger on the pulse of something, you know all the latest opinions or developments concerning it.
  • first degree murder — the most serious category of murder
  • first person plural — a grammatical category of pronouns and verbs used by the speaker to refer to or talk about himself together with others
  • first-degree murder — Law. the killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder) and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)
  • flannelmouth sucker — a sucker, Catostomus latipinnis, of the Colorado River and its tributaries.
  • floating restaurant — a boat or ship that has been converted for use as a restaurant
  • fluoride toothpaste — toothpaste containing a small amount of fluoride as protection against tooth decay
  • focal plane shutter — an opaque shield in a camera, lying in the focal plane of the lens, that, when tripped, admits light to expose the film or plate for a predetermined period, usually a fraction of a second
  • focal-plane shutter — a camera shutter situated directly in front of the film.
  • foregone conclusion — an inevitable conclusion or result.
  • forensic accountant — an accountant who specializes in applying accountancy skills to the purposes of the law
  • foundation subjects — the subjects studied as part of the National Curriculum, including the compulsory core subjects
  • four eyes principle — the requirement that a business transaction be approved by at least two individuals
  • frameshift mutation — a mutation caused by frameshift.
  • fraternal insurance — insurance underwritten by a fraternal society, under either a legal reserve plan or an assessment plan.
  • free alongside quay — (of a shipment of goods) delivered to the quay without charge to the buyer
  • functional database — (database, language)   A database which uses a functional language as its query language. Databases would seem to be an inappropriate application for functional languages since, a purely functional language would have to return a new copy of the entire database every time (part of) it was updated. To be practically scalable, the update mechanism must clearly be destructive rather than functional; however it is quite feasible for the query language to be purely functional so long as the database is considered as an argument. One approach to the update problem would use a monad to encapsulate database access and ensure it was single threaded. Alternative approaches have been suggested by Trinder, who suggests non-destructive updating with shared data structures, and Sutton who uses a variant of a Phil Wadler's linear type system. There are two main classes of functional database languages. The first is based upon Backus' FP language, of which FQL is probably the best known example. Adaplan is a more recent language which falls into this category. More recently, people have been working on languages which are syntactically very similar to modern functional programming languages, but which also provide all of the features of a database language, e.g. bulk data structures which can be incrementally updated, type systems which can be incrementally updated, and all data persisting in a database. Examples are PFL [Poulovassilis&Small, VLDB-91], and Machiavelli [Ohori et al, ACM SIGMOD Conference, 1998].
  • future date testing — (testing)   The process of setting a computer's date to a future date to test a program's (expected or unexpected) date sensitivity. Future date testing only shows the effects of dates on the computer(s) under scrutiny, it does not take into account knock-on effects of dates on other connected systems.
  • go out of one's way — manner, mode, or fashion: a new way of looking at a matter; to reply in a polite way.
  • greenhouse whitefly — See under whitefly.
  • greenstick fracture — an incomplete fracture of a long bone, in which one side is broken and the other side is still intact.
  • heat of sublimation — the heat absorbed by one gram or unit mass of a substance in the process of changing, at a constant temperature and pressure, from a solid to a gaseous state. Compare sublime (def 10).
  • house of correction — a place for the confinement and reform of persons convicted of minor offenses and not regarded as confirmed criminals.
  • house of councilors — the upper house of the Japanese diet.
  • house of ill repute — a house of prostitution; whorehouse; brothel.
  • hyperfine structure — the splitting of the lines of an atomic spectrum, produced by the angular momentum of the nucleus of the atom.
  • idea of pure reason — any of the three undemonstrable entities (a personal soul, a cosmos, and a supreme being) implicit in the fact of a subject and an object of knowledge, and in the need for some principle uniting them.
  • in consequence (of) — as a result (of)
  • isidorus of miletus — flourished 6th century a.d, Byzantine engineer. He was one of the architects of Hagia Sophia; (originally an Orthodox cathedral and currently a museum in Istanbul, Turkey).
  • jacques montgolfier — Jacques Étienne [zhahk ey-tyen] /ʒɑk eɪˈtyɛn/ (Show IPA), 1745–99, and his brother Joseph Michel [zhaw-zef mee-shel] /ʒɔˈzɛf miˈʃɛl/ (Show IPA) 1740–1810, French aeronauts: inventors of the first practical balloon 1783.
  • juan de fuca strait — strait between Vancouver Island and NW Wash.: c. 100 mi (161 km) long
  • languages of choice — C and Lisp. Nearly every hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities. There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with Fortran, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as Real Programmers, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of Mel"). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but HLL implementation, glue, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. Fortran occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming. Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and Ada, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or other traditional card walloper languages as a total and unmitigated loss.
  • life-support system — A life-support system is the same as a life-support machine.
  • lift up one's voice — to speak out loudly
  • limit of resolution — the capacity of an optical system to resolve point objects as separate images.
  • lose in the shuffle — to leave out or disregard in the confusion of things
  • luminous efficiency — the perceived brightness of light as a ratio of the total luminous flux to total radiant flux of the source; a measure of brightness obtained by dividing the source's luminous flux by the consumption of its energy.
  • malicious falsehood — a lie told by someone who knows the lie is false or knows it will do harm to the person it is concerning
  • master of foxhounds — the person responsible for the conduct of a fox hunt and to whom all members of the hunt and its staff are responsible. Abbreviation: M.F.H.
  • means of production — resources: equipment, workers
  • measure for measure — a comedy (1604) by Shakespeare.
  • membership function — fuzzy subset
  • mid-autumn festival — a Chinese festival that is held to celebrate the end of the summer harvest, when the crops have been gathered.
  • missing fundamental — a tone, not present in the sound received by the ear, whose pitch is that of the difference between the two tones that are sounded
  • mother-of-thousands — strawberry geranium.
  • neats vs. scruffies — (artificial intelligence, jargon)   The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in artificial intelligence research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; "neats" tend to try to build systems that "reason" in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while "scruffies" profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favour looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture "common sense" of living intelligences.
  • neufchâtel (cheese) — a soft white cheese prepared from whole milk or skim milk and eaten fresh or cured
  • objectfuscated code — (humour, programming)   Object-oriented code which has been abstracted to so many levels that no-one can understand it anymore. A play on obfuscated code.
  • on (or off) course — moving (or not moving) in the intended direction
  • on cue/as if on cue — If you say that something happened on cue or as if on cue, you mean that it happened just when it was expected to happen, or just at the right time.
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