18-letter words containing g, l, a, b
- 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
- engelbart, douglas — Douglas Engelbart
- 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.
- gabriele dannunzio — Gabriele [Italian gah-bree-e-le] /Italian ˌgɑ briˈɛ lɛ/ (Show IPA), (Duca Minimo) 1863–1938, Italian soldier, novelist, and poet.
- gamal abdel nasser — Gamal Abdel [guh-mahl ab-doo l,, juh-] /gəˈmɑl ˈæb dʊl,, dʒə-/ (Show IPA), 1918–70, Egyptian military and political leader: prime minister of Egypt 1954–56; president of Egypt 1956–58; president of the United Arab Republic 1958–70.
- gamblers anonymous — an organization that holds group meetings to help people who are addicted to gambling
- 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-permeable lens — a semisoft contact lens, usually removed each day, that allows air to pass through to the eye and affords a wider range of vision corrections than a soft contact lens.
- 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.
- gladden sb's heart — If you say that something gladdens someone's heart, you mean that it makes them feel pleased and hopeful.
- golden bantam corn — a horticultural variety of sweet corn having yellow kernels.
- golden gate bridge — a bridge connecting N California with San Francisco peninsula. 4200-foot (1280-meter) center span.
- golden-brown algae — a group of mostly marine, motile algae of the phylum Chlorophyta, characterized by the presence of the pigments chlorophyll, carotene, and xanthophyll, which impart golden to yellow-brown colors.
- gooseneck barnacle — goose barnacle
- 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.
- 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.
- invisible earnings — earnings from services provided rather than goods
- irregular variable — a variable star whose brightness variation is irregular.
- kentucky bluegrass — a grass, Poa pratensis, of the Mississippi valley, used for pasturage and lawns.
- 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
- lubber grasshopper — plains grasshopper.
- malpighian tubules — one of a group of long, slender excretory tubules at the anterior end of the hindgut in insects and other terrestrial arthropods.
- noninterchangeable — That cannot be interchanged with another.
- north attleborough — a city in SE Massachusetts.
- not by a long shot — absolutely not
- optical brightener — an additive that dyes and brightens fabric or paper
- palm beach gardens — a city in SE Florida, near North Palm Beach.
- personal bodyguard — a person employed to protect a particular person
- 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
- ragtag and bobtail — the riffraff; rabble: The ragtag and bobtail of every nation poured into the frontier in search of gold.
- range of stability — the angle to the perpendicular through which a vessel may be heeled without losing the ability to right itself.
- reggio di calabria — a seaport in S Italy, on the Strait of Messina: almost totally destroyed by an earthquake 1908.
- relational algebra — (database, theory) A family of algebra with a well-founded semantics used for modelling the data stored in relational databases, and defining queries on it. The main operations of the relational algebra are the set operations (such as union, intersection, and cartesian product), selection (keeping only some lines of a table) and the projection (keeping only some columns). The relational data model describes how the data is structured.
- richard p. gabriel — Richard Gabriel
- seven-league boots — mythical boots that allowed the wearer to travel seven leagues (a former unit of measurement), ie a great length, at each step
- significant symbol — a verbal or nonverbal gesture, as a word or smile, that has acquired a conventionalized meaning.
- social bookmarking — the practice of saving bookmarked Web pages to a public website as a way to share the links with other Internet users: Social bookmarking is a tool that allows you to add tags and comments to your bookmarks.
- subliminal message — a message passed to the human mind without the mind being consciously aware of it, as, for example, in advertising
- submaxillary gland — submandibular gland.