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18-letter words containing h, i, r, u

  • considered harmful — (programming, humour)   A type of phrase based on the title of Edsger W. Dijkstra's famous note in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM, "Goto Statement Considered Harmful", which fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars. Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by policy) no longer print articles taking so assertive a position against a coding practice. In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and parodies bore titles of the form "X considered Y". The structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the realisation that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke.
  • cornucopian thesis — the belief that, as long as science and technology continue to advance, growth can continue for ever because these new advances create new resources
  • corpus christi bay — a bay in S Texas, at the mouth of the Nueces River.
  • counter-hypothesis — a proposition, or set of propositions, set forth as an explanation for the occurrence of some specified group of phenomena, either asserted merely as a provisional conjecture to guide investigation (working hypothesis) or accepted as highly probable in the light of established facts.
  • countertherapeutic — Working against a therapy.
  • cunninghame graham — R(obert) B(ontine). 1852–1936, Scottish traveller, writer, and politician, noted for his essays and short stories: first president (1928) of the Scottish Nationalist Party
  • cushing's syndrome — a medical condition characterized by obesity, hypertension, excessive hair growth, etc., caused by an overactive adrenal gland or large doses of corticosteroids
  • destruct mechanism — a mechanism that causes the destruction of a rocket or missile when activated
  • devil's paintbrush — a perennial European hawkweed (Hieracium aurantiacum) with leafless flower stalks bearing a cluster of orange-red heads: now a common weed in N U.S. and Canada
  • diatomaceous earth — an unconsolidated form of diatomite
  • drop in the bucket — a deep, cylindrical vessel, usually of metal, plastic, or wood, with a flat bottom and a semicircular bail, for collecting, carrying, or holding water, sand, fruit, etc.; pail.
  • duty-free shopping — the making of duty-free purchases
  • eighty-twenty rule — (programming)   The program-design version of the law of diminishing returns. The 80/20 rule says that roughly 80% of the problem can be solved with 20% of the effort that it would take to solve the whole problem. For example, parsing e-mail addresses in "From:" lines in e-mail messages is notoriously difficult if you follow the RFC 2822 specification. However, about 60% of actual "From:" lines are in the format "From: Their Name <[email protected]>", with a far more constrained idea of what can be in "user" or "host" than in RFC 2822. Another 25% just add double-quotes around "Their Name". Matching just those two patterns would thus cover 85% of "From:" lines, with a tiny portion of the code required to fully implement RFC2822. (Adding support for "From: [email protected]" and "From: [email protected] (Their Name) " brings coverage to almost 100%, leaving only really baroque things that RFC-2822 permits, like "From: Pete(A wonderful \) chap)
  • electrotherapeutic — Relating to electrotherapeutics.
  • equine herpesvirus — a viral disease of horses that may cause respiratory signs, abortion, neonatal death, and paresis. A vaccine is available against this disease
  • established church — a Church that is officially recognized as a national institution, esp the Church of England
  • euclid's algorithm — (algorithm)   (Or "Euclidean Algorithm") An algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor (GCD) of two numbers. It relies on the identity gcd(a, b) = gcd(a-b, b) To find the GCD of two numbers by this algorithm, repeatedly replace the larger by subtracting the smaller from it until the two numbers are equal. E.g. 132, 168 -> 132, 36 -> 96, 36 -> 60, 36 -> 24, 36 -> 24, 12 -> 12, 12 so the GCD of 132 and 168 is 12. This algorithm requires only subtraction and comparison operations but can take a number of steps proportional to the difference between the initial numbers (e.g. gcd(1, 1001) will take 1000 steps).
  • exclusive brethren — one of the two main divisions of the Plymouth Brethren, which, in contrast to the Open Brethren, restricts its members' contacts with those outside the sect
  • executive chairman — the most senior internal position within a company, combining the duties of chairman and chief executive
  • five hundred rummy — a variety of rummy in which the winner is the first player to score 500 points.
  • furnishing fabrics — fabrics used to make and cover furniture
  • gas-discharge tube — any tube in which an electric discharge takes place through a gas
  • get one's irish up — of, relating to, or characteristic of Ireland, its inhabitants, or their language.
  • glomerulonephritis — a kidney disease affecting the capillaries of the glomeruli, characterized by albuminuria, edema, and hypertension.
  • government housing — housing owned and managed by the federal or state government, which is rented out to tenants, esp as a form of affordable housing
  • greenhouse warming — the increase in the mean temperature of the earth attributed to the greenhouse effect
  • ha ha only serious — (SF fandom, originally as mutation of HHOK, "Ha Ha Only Kidding") A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavour of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or truths that are constructed on in-joke and self-parody. The Jargon File contains many examples of ha-ha-only-serious in both form and content. Indeed, the entirety of hacker culture is often perceived as ha-ha-only-serious by hackers themselves; to take it either too lightly or too seriously marks a person as an outsider, a wannabee, or in larval stage. For further enlightenment on this subject, consult any Zen master. See also AI koan.
  • hash house slinger — a person who serves in a cheap cafe
  • hawksbill (turtle) — a medium-sized marine turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata, family Cheloniidae) having a hawklike beak and a horny shell from which tortoise shell is obtained
  • heart-lung machine — a device through which blood is shunted temporarily for oxygenation during surgery, while the heart or a lung is being repaired.
  • heimlich manoeuvre — a technique in first aid to dislodge a foreign body in a person's windpipe by applying sudden upward pressure on the upper abdomen
  • helicopter gunship — military attack helicopter
  • hemidemisemiquaver — a sixty-fourth note.
  • heuristics testing — failure-directed testing
  • highbush blueberry — a spreading, bushy shrub, Vaccinium corymbosum, of eastern North America, having small, urn-shaped, white or pinkish flowers, and bluish-black edible fruit, growing about 10 feet (3 meters) high.
  • highbush cranberry — a shrub, Viburnum trilobum, of northern North America, having broad clusters of white flowers and edible scarlet berries.
  • hit-and-run driver — sb: leaves accident scene
  • honour moderations — (at Oxford University) the first public examination, in which candidates are placed into one of three classes of honours
  • honourable mention — If something that you do in a competition is given an honourable mention, it receives special praise from the judges although it does not actually win a prize.
  • houghton-le-spring — a town in N England, in Sunderland unitary authority, Tyne and Wear: coal-mining. Pop: 36 746 (2001)
  • human rights group — a group that campaigns for human rights
  • hungarian notation — (language, convention)   A linguistic convention requiring one or more letters to be added to the start of variable names to denote scope and/or type. Hungarian Notation is mainly confined to Microsoft Windows programming environments, such as Microsoft C, C++ and Visual Basic. It was originally devised by Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian, who was a senior programmer at Microsoft for many years. He disliked the way that names in C programs gave no clue as to the type, leading to frequent programmer errors. According to legend, fellow programmers at Microsoft, on seeing the convoluted, vowel-less variable names produced by his scheme, said, "This might as well be in Greek - or even Hungarian!". They made up the name "Hungarian notation" (possibly with "reverse Polish notation" in mind). Hungarian Notation is not really necessary when using a modern strongly-typed language as the compiler warns the programmer if a variable of one type is used as if it were another type. It is less useful in object-oriented programming languages such as C++, where many variables are going to be instances of classes and so begin with "obj". In addition, variable names are essentially only comments, and thus are just as susceptible to becoming out-of-date and incorrect as any other comment. For example, if a signed short int becomes an unsigned long int, the variable name, and every use of it, should be changed to reflect its new type. A variable's name should describe the values it holds. Type and scope are aspects of this, but Hungarian Notation overemphasises their importance by allocating so much of the start of the name to them. Furthermore, type and scope information can be found from the variable's declaration. Ironically, this is particularly easy in the development environments in which Hungarian Notation is typically used.
  • hydroflumethiazide — A diuretic drug.
  • hydroxychloroquine — a colorless crystalline solid, C 18 H 26 ClN 3 O, used in the treatment of malaria, lupus erythematosus, and rheumatoid arthritis.
  • hyper-intellectual — appealing to or engaging the intellect: intellectual pursuits.
  • hyperbilirubinemia — an abnormally high level of bilirubin in the blood, manifested by jaundice, anorexia, and malaise, occurring in association with liver disease and certain hemolytic anemias.
  • hypersexualisation — Alternative spelling of hypersexualization.
  • hypersexualization — The act or process of hypersexualizing.
  • hyposulfurous acid — an acid, H 2 S 2 O 4 , next in a series below sulfurous acid, known only in solution or in the form of its salts.
  • immunopharmacology — the branch of pharmacology concerned with the immune system
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