18-letter words containing g, a, b, i
- credibility rating — a supposed measure of how far a person can be believed or trusted
- distinguishability — to mark off as different (often followed by from or by): He was distinguished from the other boys by his height.
- dressing table set — a set including a hairbrush, mirror and comb, often with silver backs
- eclipsing variable — a variable star whose changes in brightness are caused by periodic eclipses of two stars in a binary system.
- electronic banking — the transfer of money between financial institutions through an exchange of electronic signals over a network
- fibrocartilaginous — a type of cartilage having a large number of fibers.
- flash butt welding — a method of welding metal edge-to-edge with a powerful electric flash followed by the application of pressure.
- fragmentation bomb — a bomb designed to break into many small, high-velocity fragments when detonated.
- furnishing fabrics — fabrics used to make and cover furniture
- gabriele dannunzio — Gabriele [Italian gah-bree-e-le] /Italian ˌgɑ briˈɛ lɛ/ (Show IPA), (Duca Minimo) 1863–1938, Italian soldier, novelist, and poet.
- gamma distribution — a continuous two-parameter distribution from which the chi-square and exponential distributions are derived, written Gamma (α. β), where α and β are greater than zero, and defined in terms of the gamma function
- garbage collection — (programming) (GC) The process by which dynamically allocated storage is reclaimed during the execution of a program. The term usually refers to automatic periodic storage reclamation by the garbage collector (part of the run-time system), as opposed to explicit code to free specific blocks of memory. Automatic garbage collection is usually triggered during memory allocation when the amount free memory falls below some threshold or after a certain number of allocations. Normal execution is suspended and the garbage collector is run. There are many variations on this basic scheme. Languages like Lisp represent expressions as graphs built from cells which contain pointers and data. These languages use automatic dynamic storage allocation to build expressions. During the evaluation of an expression it is necessary to reclaim space which is used by subexpressions but which is no longer pointed to by anything. This reclaimed memory is returned to the free memory pool for subsequent reallocation. Without garbage collection the program's memory requirements would increase monotonically throughout execution, possibly exceeding system limits on virtual memory size. The three main methods are mark-sweep garbage collection, reference counting and copying garbage collection. See also the AI koan about garbage collection.
- gas-discharge tube — any tube in which an electric discharge takes place through a gas
- gilbert and george — a team of artists, Gilbert Proesch, Italian, born 1942, and George Passmore, British, born 1943: noted esp for their photomontages and performance works
- giuseppe garibaldi — Giuseppe [juh-sep-ee;; Italian joo-zep-pe] /dʒəˈsɛp i;; Italian dʒuˈzɛp pɛ/ (Show IPA), 1807–82, Italian patriot and general.
- give sb their head — If you give someone their head, you allow them to do what they want to do, without trying to advise or stop them.
- golden gate bridge — a bridge connecting N California with San Francisco peninsula. 4200-foot (1280-meter) center span.
- good/not bad going — If you say that something that has been achieved is good going or not bad going, you mean that it is better than usual or than expected.
- great barrier reef — coral structure off Australian coast
- grumbling appendix — a condition in which the appendix causes intermittent pain but appendicitis has not developed
- hardy-weinberg law — a principle stating that in an infinitely large, randomly mating population in which selection, migration, and mutation do not occur, the frequencies of alleles and genotypes do not change from generation to generation.
- have a thing about — If you have a thing about someone or something, you have very strong feelings about them.
- hermaphrodite brig — a two-masted sailing vessel, square-rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft-rigged on the mainmast.
- herring bone weave — a pattern consisting of adjoining vertical rows of slanting lines, any two contiguous lines forming either a V or an inverted V , used in masonry, textiles, embroidery, etc.
- highbush cranberry — a shrub, Viburnum trilobum, of northern North America, having broad clusters of white flowers and edible scarlet berries.
- in good/bad repair — If something such as a building is in good repair, it is in good condition. If it is in bad repair, it is in bad condition.
- in-band signalling — (communications) (Or CAS, channel associated signaling) Transmission of control signals in the same channel as data. This is commonly used in the Public Switched Telephone Network where the same pair of wires carry both voice and control signals (e.g. dialling, ringing). Another example is the use on a computer serial line of Control-S and Control-Q characters for flow control as opposed to hardware flow control which would be out-of-band signalling. In digital communications, in-band signalling often uses "bit-robbing" where, for example, one bit in each frame is used for signalling instead of data. This is the reason why a D1 channel in the T-carrier system can only carry 56 Kbps of usable data instead of the 64 Kbps carried by the D0 channel in the E-carrier system.
- interchangeability — (of two things) capable of being put or used in the place of each other: interchangeable symbols.
- intimate borrowing — the borrowing of linguistic forms by one language or dialect from another when both occupy a single geographical or cultural community.
- invisible earnings — earnings from services provided rather than goods
- irregular variable — a variable star whose brightness variation is irregular.
- knight of the bath — a member of a knightly order founded by George I of England in 1725.
- labeled bracketing — a representation of the constituent structure of a string, as a word or sentence, comparable to a tree diagram, in which each constituent is shown in brackets and given a subscript grammatical label, with each bracketed item corresponding to a node in a tree diagram.
- legislative branch — the branch of government having the power to make laws; the legislature.
- lingual titubation — stuttering or stammering
- logically possible — capable of being described without self-contradiction
- malpighian tubules — one of a group of long, slender excretory tubules at the anterior end of the hindgut in insects and other terrestrial arthropods.
- manufacturing base — the manufacturing industries of an area or a country considered as a unit and a constituent part of the economy
- medicine bow range — a range of the Rocky Mountains, in Wyoming and Colorado. Highest peak, Medicine Bow Peak, 12,014 feet (3662 meters).
- moving bed reactor — A moving bed reactor is a reactor in which a layer of catalyst in the form of granules is moved between a reaction area and a regeneration area.
- neighborhood watch — a neighborhood surveillance program or group in which residents keep watch over one another's houses, patrol the streets, etc., in an attempt to prevent crime.
- noninterchangeable — That cannot be interchanged with another.
- obedience training — the training of an animal, especially a dog, to obey certain commands.
- optical brightener — an additive that dyes and brightens fabric or paper
- pattern bargaining — a collective bargaining technique in which contract terms in one settlement are used as models to be imposed on other negotiating parties within an industry.
- play silly buggers — to fool around and waste time
- point-bearing pile — a pile depending on the soil or rock beneath its foot for support.
- publicity campaign — an effort to convey information to the public
- publishing company — a firm which publishes books
- punishment beating — a form of corporal punishment carried out by a paramilitary organization on a member of another sectarian organization, usually in Northern Ireland