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21-letter words containing g, a, t, h, e

  • mother-of-pearl glass — an American art glassware having colored glass set into indentations in a thickness of opaque glass, the whole covered with clear glass and etched slightly with acid.
  • night storage heating — a system of heating which uses a heater or radiator that stores heat at night-time because electricity is cheaper
  • nightmare file system — Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher spl level). Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the entire network of machines is frozen - worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great misfeature). ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s. See also broadcast storm.
  • no/nothing other than — You use nothing other than and no other than when you are going to mention a course of action, decision, or description and emphasize that it is the only one possible in the situation.
  • north east new guinea — the NE part of the former Australian Territory of New Guinea; now part of Papua New Guinea.
  • not care a hang about — to not care the least bit about
  • one foot in the grave — near to death
  • one thing and another — You can use the expression 'one thing and another' to suggest that there are several reasons for something or several items on a list, but you are not going to explain or mention them all.
  • orthogonal projection — a two-dimensional graphic representation of an object in which the projecting lines are at right angles to the plane of the projection. Also called orthogonal projection. Compare isometric (def 5).
  • orthogonal trajectory — the locus of a point whose path cuts each curve of a family of curves at right angles.
  • pacific daylight time — the version of Pacific Standard Time that is in use when daylight saving time is being observed
  • path coverage testing — (testing)   Testing a program by examining which lines of executable code are visited (as in code coverage testing) and also the ways of getting to each line of code and the subsequent sequence of execution. Path coverage testing is the most comprehensive type of testing that a test suite can provide. It can find more bugs, especially those that are caused by data coupling. However, path coverage is hard and usually only used for small and/or critical sections of code.
  • polygenic inheritance — the heredity of complex characters that are determined by a large number of genes, each one usually having a relatively small effect.
  • portrait photographer — a photographer who specializes in portraits
  • profit-sharing scheme — a scheme employing profit-sharing; a system in which a portion of the net profit of a business is distributed to its employees, usually in proportion to their wages or their length of service
  • programmed cell death — a normal, genetically regulated process leading to the death of cells and triggered by the presence or absence of certain stimuli, as DNA damage.
  • pulse height analyser — a multichannel analyser that sorts pulses into selected amplitude ranges
  • pulse height analyzer — an instrument that records or counts an electrical pulse if its amplitude falls within specified limits: used in nuclear physics research for the determination of energy spectra of nuclear radiations
  • purchasing department — the group of staff within an organization that is responsible for buying goods or products
  • rayleigh distribution — (mathematics)   A curve that yields a good approximation to the actual labour curves on software projects.
  • reconnaissance flight — a flight made by an aircraft in order to obtain military information about a particular place
  • rectangular hyperbola — a hyperbola with perpendicular asymptotes
  • replacement algorithm — The method used to determine which entry in an associative cache to flush to main memory when it is desired to cache a new block of data. The "least recently used" algorithm flushed the block which has not been accessed for the longest time. A random replacement algorithm picks any block with equal probability.
  • right-angled triangle — a triangle one angle of which is a right angle
  • ring down the curtain — to lower the curtain at the end of a theatrical performance
  • ring-around-the-rosey — a children's game in which the players sing while going around in a circle and squat when the lyrics “all fall down” are sung.
  • rolling in the aisles — (of an audience) overcome with laughter
  • rutherford scattering — the scattering of an alpha particle through a large angle with respect to the original direction of motion of the particle, caused by an atom (Rutherford atom) with most of the mass and all of the positive electric charge concentrated at a center or nucleus.
  • safe in the knowledge — If you do something safe in the knowledge that something else is the case, you do the first thing confidently because you are sure of the second thing.
  • sail against the wind — to sail a course that slants slightly away from the true direction of the wind; sail closehauled
  • salam-weinberg theory — the electroweak theory.
  • satisficing behaviour — the form of behaviour demonstrated by firms who seek satisfactory profits and satisfactory growth rather than maximum profits
  • schlieren photography — a type of photography which records schlieren
  • sealed-beam headlight — a headlight in which the reflector and lens are hermetically sealed together with the filament in a single unit.
  • secure hash algorithm —
  • seeing/hearing things — If you say that someone is seeing or hearing things, you mean that they believe they are seeing or hearing something that is not really there.
  • short message service — (messaging)   (SMS) A message service offered by the GSM digital mobile telephone system. Using SMS, a short alphanumeric message (160 alphanumeric characters) can be sent to a mobile phone to be displayed there, much like in an alphanumeric pager system. The message is buffered by the GSM network until the phone becomes active.
  • siamese fighting fish — a labyrinth fish, Betta splendens, that has been bred for centuries to develop brilliant coloration, very long fins, and pugnacity.
  • single spanish burton — a tackle having a runner as well as the fall supporting the load, giving a mechanical advantage of three, neglecting friction.
  • sovereign wealth fund — an investment fund created using the financial assets of a national government
  • swim against the tide — to resist prevailing opinion
  • the acting profession — actors considered as a group
  • the icing on the cake — If you describe something as the icing on the cake, you mean that it makes a good thing even better, but it is not essential.
  • the moral high ground — If you say that someone has taken the moral high ground, you mean that they consider that their policies and actions are morally superior to the policies and actions of their rivals.
  • the rock of gibraltar — a limestone promontory at the tip of S Spain
  • the royal scots greys — (formerly) a British cavalry regiment, the Second Dragoons
  • the shipping forecast — a radio broadcast made by the BBC of weather reports and forecasts for the seas around the British Isles
  • threatening behaviour — intimidation or intentional behaviour that causes another person to fear injury or harm
  • three-quarter binding — a binding in which the material used for the back extends further over the covers than in half binding.
  • threshold wage policy — a policy whereby wages are increased in accordance with inflation
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