17-letter words containing f, y
- dimethylformamide — a colourless liquid widely used as a solvent and sometimes as a catalyst. Formula: (CH3)2NCHO
- dimethylsulfoxide — DMSO.
- dress-down friday — In some companies employees are allowed to wear clothes that are less smart than usual on a Friday. This day is known as a dress-down Friday.
- dwarf huckleberry — tangleberry.
- efficiency expert — a person who studies the methods, procedures, and job characteristics of a business or factory with the object of devising ways to increase the efficiency of equipment and personnel.
- electron affinity — a measure of the ability of an atom or molecule to form a negative ion, expressed as the energy released when an electron is attached
- employee benefits — benefits, such as health insurance, pension payments, or childcare, given to employees in addition to their usual salary or wage
- employment office — any of a number of government offices established to collect and supply to the unemployed information about job vacancies and to employers information about availability of prospective workers
- energy efficiency — a measure of how efficiently an appliance, building, organization or country uses energy
- enzyme deficiency — failure of the body to produce a specific enzy
- factory inspector — a person who inspects factories
- fancy dress party — a party at which the guests wear fancy dress
- farming community — a community where farming is the main industry
- feasibility study — (systems analysis) Part of the systems develpment life cycle which aims to determine whether it is sensible to develop some system. The most popular model of feasibility study is "TELOS", standing for Technical, Economic, Legal, Operational, Schedule. Technical Feasibility: does the technology exist to implement the proposed system? Is it a practical proposition? Economic Feasibility: is the system cost-effective? Do benefits outweigh costs? Legal Feasibility: is there any conflict between the proposed system and legal requirements, e.g. the Data Protection Act? Operational Feasibility: are the current work practices and procedures adequate to support the new system? Schedule Feasibility: can the system be developed in time? After the feasibility study, the requirements analysis should be carried out.
- fee-paying school — a school which charges fees to parents of pupils
- fellow countryman — sb of same nationality
- ferrimagnetically — In a ferrimagnetic manner.
- field penny-cress — the common penny-cress, Thlaspi arvense.
- firehose syndrome — (networking, jargon) An absence, failure or inadequacy of flow control mechanisms causing the sender to overwhelm the receiver. The implication is that, like trying to drink from a firehose, the consequenses are worse than just loss of data, e.g. the receiver may crash. See ping-flood.
- first-loss policy — an insurance policy for goods in which a total loss is extremely unlikely and the insurer agrees to provide cover for a sum less than the total value of the property
- flash photography — photography using a momentary flash of artificial light as a source of illumination.
- floating currency — a currency that is free to fluctuate against other currencies in accordance with market forces
- floating dry dock — a dock that floats and can be lowered in the water for the entrance of a ship, and then raised for use as a dry dock
- floppy disk drive — disk drive
- footmen's gallery — the rearmost section of seats in the balcony of an English theater, especially in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
- for love or money — If you cannot or will not do something for love or money, you are completely unable to do it or you do not intend to do it.
- forcing frequency — the frequency of an oscillating force applied to a system
- foreign secretary — foreign minister.
- forever and a day — without ever ending; eternally: to last forever.
- fountain of youth — a fabled spring whose waters were supposed to restore health and youth, sought in the Bahamas and Florida by Ponce de León, Narváez, De Soto, and others.
- four-eyed opossum — a small opossum, Metachirops (Philander) opossum, ranging from Mexico to Brazil, having a white spot above each eye.
- four-part harmony — harmony in which each chord has four tones, creating, in sum, four melodic lines.
- four-rowed barley — a class of barley having, in each spike, six rows of grain, with two pairs of rows overlapping.
- four-stroke cycle — A four-stroke cycle is the cycle of engine operation which requires four strokes of the piston: for induction, compression, ignition, and exhaust.
- fraternal society — a club or other association, usually of men, having a limited membership and devoted to professional, religious, charitable, or social activities.
- free-body diagram — A free-body diagram is a diagram of a structure in which all supports are replaced by forces.
- frequency polygon — a frequency curve consisting of connected line segments formed by joining the midpoints of the upper edges of the rectangles in a histogram whose class intervals are of uniform length.
- friend of dorothy — a male homosexual
- front-end payment — a payment required or incurred in advance of a project in order to get it under way
- front-line player — a regular player on a sports team or one who plays in the farthest forward position
- funicular railway — a short, very steep railway having two parallel sets of tracks, upon each of which runs a car or train raised or lowered by means of a cable that simultaneously lowers or raises the other car or train in such a way that the two are approximately counterbalanced.
- fuzzy-wuzzy angel — any native of Papua New Guinea who assisted as a stretcher-bearer in World War II
- gamblers' fallacy — the fallacy that in a series of chance events the probability of one event occurring increases with the number of times another event has occurred in succession
- gibbs free energy — the thermodynamic function of a system that is equal to its enthalpy minus the product of its absolute temperture and entropy: a decrease in the function is equal to the maximum amount of work available exclusive of that due to pressure times volume change during a reversible, isothermal, isobaric process.
- glory-of-the-snow — any of several plants belonging to the genus Chionodoxa, of the lily family, native to the Old World, having showy, blue, white, or pink flowers that bloom early in the spring.
- go out of the way — to inconvenience oneself; do something that one would not ordinarily do, or that requires extra or deliberate effort or trouble
- great rift valley — a series of rift valleys running from N to S, from the Jordan Valley in SW Asia to Mozambique in SE Africa.
- grey-faced petrel — a dark-coloured New Zealand petrel, Pterodroma macroptera gouldi
- gulf war syndrome — a group of symptoms occurring in some Gulf War veterans, most commonly including headache and memory loss, muscle pain, skin disorders, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and gastrointestinal and respiratory ailments, possibly caused by exposure to chemical weapons, vaccines, infectious diseases, or other factors.
- henry of portugal — ("the Navigator") 1394–1460, prince of Portugal: sponsor of geographic explorations.