16-letter words containing g, i, a
- dinosaurs mating — (humour) The activity said to occur when yet another big iron merger or buy-out occurs; reflects a perception by hackers that these signal another stage in the long, slow dying of the mainframe industry. Also described as "elephants mating": lots of noise and action at a high level, with an eventual outcome in the somewhat distant future. In its glory days of the 1960s, it was "IBM and the Seven Dwarves": Burroughs, Control Data, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and Univac. Early on, RCA sold out to Univac and GE also sold out, and it was "IBM and the BUNCH" (an acronym for Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell) for a while. Honeywell was bought out by Bull. Univac in turn merged with Sperry to form Sperry/Univac, which was later merged (although the employees of Sperry called it a hostile takeover) with Burroughs to form Unisys in 1986 (this was when the phrase "dinosaurs mating" was coined). In 1991 AT&T absorbed NCR, only to spit it out again in 1996. Unisys bought Convergent Technologies in 1988 and later others. More such earth-shaking unions of doomed giants seem inevitable.
- diphthongisation — The process by which a single vowel sound (monophthong) shifts to a two-vowel vocalization (diphthong).
- diphthongization — to change into or pronounce as a diphthong.
- direct marketing — marketing direct to the consumer, as by direct mail or coupon advertising.
- director general — the executive head of an organization or of a major subdivision, as a branch or agency, of government.
- director-general — the executive head of an organization or of a major subdivision, as a branch or agency, of government.
- disagreeableness — (uncountable) The state or quality of being disagreeable.
- disappearing act — magic trick
- discharging arch — an arch for taking some of the weight from a structural member beneath it.
- disclosing agent — a vegetable dye, administered as a liquid or in tablet form (disclosing tablet), that stains plaque, making it readily apparent on the teeth
- discographically — In terms of discography.
- discombobulating — Present participle of discombobulate.
- discountenancing — Present participle of discountenance.
- discriminatingly — With discrimination.
- disenfranchising — Present participle of disenfranchise.
- dispersing agent — a surface-active substance added to a suspension, usually a colloid, to improve the separation of particles and to prevent settling or clumping
- disposable goods — consumer goods that are used up a short time after purchase, including perishables, newspapers, clothes, etc
- district heating — a heating system in which centrally generated heat is distributed via ducts and pipes to multiple buildings or locations
- division algebra — a linear algebra in which each element of the vector space has a multiplicative inverse.
- document imaging — the process of converting paper documents into an electronic or digital format
- double-breasting — the practice of employing nonunion workers, especially in a separate division, to supplement the work of higher-paid union workers.
- drag coefficient — a measure of the drag of an object in a moving fluid, esp air
- drainage channel — a channel along which drained water flows away
- dredging machine — dredge1 (def 1).
- dressing station — a post or center that gives first aid to the wounded, located near a combat area.
- drug trafficking — smuggling illegal drugs
- dual carriageway — divided highway.
- duplicate bridge — a form of contract bridge used in tournaments in which contestants play the identical series of deals, with each deal being scored independently, permitting individual scores to be compared.
- dutch guinea pig — a breed of two-tone short-haired guinea pig
- dutch new guinea — a former name of Irian Jaya.
- dynamic language — (language) (Dylan) A simple object-oriented Lisp dialect, most closely resembling CLOS and Scheme, developed by Advanced Technology Group East at Apple Computer. See also Marlais.
- dynamic markings — directions and symbols used to indicate degrees of loudness
- eager evaluation — Any evaluation strategy where evaluation of some or all function arguments is started before their value is required. A typical example is call-by-value, where all arguments are passed evaluated. The opposite of eager evaluation is call-by-need where evaluation of an argument is only started when it is required. The term "speculative evaluation" is very close in meaning to eager evaluation but is applied mostly to parallel architectures whereas eager evaluation is used of both sequential and parallel evaluators. Eager evaluation does not specify exactly when argument evaluation takes place - it might be done fully speculatively (all redexes in the program reduced in parallel) or may be done by the caller just before the function is entered. The term "eager evaluation" was invented by Carl Hewitt and Henry Baker <[email protected]> and used in their paper ["The Incremental Garbage Collection of Processes", Sigplan Notices, Aug 1977. ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/Futures.html]. It was named after their "eager beaver" evaluator. See also conservative evaluation, lenient evaluation, strict evaluation.
- earnings-related — An earnings-related payment or benefit provides higher or lower payments according to the amount a person was earning while working.
- earth-shattering — earthshaking.
- east gwillimbury — a town in S Ontario, in S Canada.
- eastern kingbird — any of several American tyrant flycatchers of the genus Tyrannus, especially T. tyrannus (eastern kingbird) of North America, known for their pugnacious disposition toward predators.
- echocardiographs — Plural form of echocardiograph.
- echocardiography — an instrument employing reflected ultrasonic waves to examine the structures and functioning of the heart.
- eclipsing binary — a variable star whose changes in brightness are caused by periodic eclipses of two stars in a binary system.
- ecological niche — niche (def 3).
- economic embargo — a legal stoppage of commerce, usually taken by one nation or group of nations to harm the economy of another nation or group, often to force a political change
- economic migrant — person: seeks work abroad
- ecotoxicological — Of or pertaining to ecotoxicology.
- el camino bignum — (humour) /el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ The road mundanely called El Camino Real, a road through the San Francisco peninsula that originally extended all the way down to Mexico City and many portions of which are still intact. Navigation on the San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which defines logical north and south even though it isn't really north-south many places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University. The Spanish word "real" (which has two syllables: /ray-al'/) means "royal"; El Camino Real is "the royal road". In the Fortran language, a "real" quantity is a number typically precise to seven significant digits, and a "double precision" quantity is a larger floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (other languages have similar "real" types). When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on "real", he started calling it "El Camino Double Precision" - but when the hacker was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it "El Camino Bignum", and that name has stuck. (See bignum).
- electrolytic gas — a mixture of two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen by volume, formed by the electrolysis of water
- electromagnetics — Electricity and magnetism, collectively, as a field of study.
- electromagnetism — The interaction of electric currents or fields and magnetic fields.
- electromigration — (physics) the transport of small particles under the influence of an electric charge.
- electronic organ — an electrophonic instrument played by means of a keyboard, in which sounds are produced and amplified by any of various electronic or electrical means