20-letter words containing i, c, l, e, s
- explicit parallelism — A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which allows or forces the programmer to annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks. This is obviously more work for the programmer than a system with implicit parallelism (where the system decides automatically which parts to run in parallel) but may allow higher performance.
- federal constitution — Constitution of the United States.
- field ion microscope — a device in which the atomic structure of the surface of a conductor is made visible by introducing helium gas into the device and applying a high voltage to ionize and accelerate the gas toward a fluorescent screen.
- field-ion microscope — a device in which the atomic structure of the surface of a conductor is made visible by introducing helium gas into the device and applying a high voltage to ionize and accelerate the gas toward a fluorescent screen.
- file descriptor leak — (programming) (Or "fd leak" /F D leek/) A kind of programming bug analogous to a core leak, in which a program fails to close file descriptors ("fd"s) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually runs out of them. See leak.
- financial instrument — A financial instrument is a document or contract that can be traded in a market, that represents an asset to one party and a liability or equity to the other.
- financial statements — Financial statements are all of the reports that show how a company is performing for a certain period.
- first earl of cromer — 1st Earl of, Evelyn Baring.
- five-elements school — Yin-Yang School.
- flame-fusion process — Verneuil process.
- fontainebleau school — a group of artists, many of them Italian and Flemish, who worked on the decorations of the palace of Fontainebleau in the 16th century.
- for sb's delectation — If you do something for someone's delectation, you do it to give them enjoyment or pleasure.
- force-field analysis — a decision-making technique, often presented graphically, that identifies all the positive and negative forces impinging on a problem
- four-colour glossies — 1. Literature created by marketroids that allegedly contains technical specs but which is in fact as superficial as possible without being totally content-free. "Forget the four-colour glossies, give me the tech ref manuals." Often applied as an indication of superficiality even when the material is printed on ordinary paper in black and white. Four-colour-glossy manuals are *never* useful for finding a problem. 2. [rare] Applied by extension to manual pages that don't contain enough information to diagnose why the program doesn't produce the expected or desired output.
- garcilaso de la vega — 1503?–36, Spanish poet.
- general public virus — (software, legal) A pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or application programs incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same terms as GNU code. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft "infects" software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code.
- geological timescale — any division of geological time into chronological units, whether relative (with units in the correct temporal sequence) or absolute (with numerical ages attached)
- glucosamine sulphate — a compound used in some herbal remedies and dietary supplements, esp to strengthen joint cartilage
- go like the clappers — to move extremely fast
- graphics accelerator — (graphics, hardware) Hardware (often an extra circuit board) to perform tasks such as plotting lines and surfaces in two or three dimensions, filling, shading and hidden line removal.
- gravimetric analysis — analysis by weight.
- great-circle sailing — sailing between two points more or less according to an arc of a great circle, in practice almost always using a series of rhumb lines of different bearings to approximate the arc, whose own bearing changes constantly unless it coincides with a meridian or the equator.
- greek-letter society — any student fraternity or sorority in a US university or college, usually using Greek letters in their title
- green light district — an area in which prostitution is officially tolerated
- group life insurance — a form of life insurance available to members of a group, typically employees of a company, under a master policy.
- hard gelatin capsule — A hard gelatin capsule is a type of capsule that is usually used to contain medicine in the form of dry powder or very small pellets.
- harmonic minor scale — minor scale (def 1).
- heteropolysaccharide — (carbohydrate) any polysaccharide formed from two or more different kinds of monosaccharide.
- highbush huckleberry — black huckleberry.
- hipparchus satellite — an astronometric satellite launched in 1989 by the European Space Agency that measured the position, proper motion, and brightness of 118 218 stars down to 12th magnitude and the magnitude and colour of a million stars down to 10th magnitude
- holder in due course — a person who has received a negotiable instrument in good faith and without notice that it is overdue, that there is any prior claim, or that there is a defect in the title of the person who negotiated it.
- horizontal scan rate — (hardware) (HSR) The measure of how many scan lines of pixels a monitor can display in one second, expressed in kHz (generally somewhere between 20 and 100 kHz). The HSR is controlled by the horizontal sync signal generated by the video controller, but is limited by the speed with which the monitor can scan the electron beam horizontally across the screen and then return it to the beginning of the next line.
- household appliances — devices or machines, usually electrical, that are in your home and which you use to do jobs such as cleaning or cooking
- hydraulic suspension — a system of motor-vehicle suspension using hydraulic members, often with hydraulic compensation between front and rear systems (hydroelastic suspension)
- hypercholesterolemia — the presence of an excessive amount of cholesterol in the blood.
- hypercholesterolemic — (pathology) Of, pertaining to, or having hypercholesterolemia.
- implicit parallelism — (parallel) A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which decides automatically which parts to run in parallel. The best way of providing implicit parallelism is still (1995) an active research topic. The problem is to generate the right number of parallel tasks of the right size (or "granularity"). Too many tasks and the system gets bogged down in house-keeping, or memory for waiting tasks runs out, too few tasks and processors are left idle. The best performance is usually achieved with explicit parallelism where the programmer can annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks.
- in a class by itself — unique
- incomprehensibleness — The state of being incomprehensible.
- incontrovertibleness — The quality of being incontrovertible.
- incremental analysis — (testing) Partial analysis of an incomplete product to allow early feedback on its development.
- industrial democracy — control of an organization by the people who work for it, esp by workers holding positions on its board of directors
- industrial insurance — industrial life insurance.
- inelastic scattering — a scattering of particles due to an inelastic collision that also changes their wavelengths and phases.
- insolvency provision — the right of employees of a firm that goes bankrupt or into receivership to receive money owed to them as wages, etc
- insulin-coma therapy — a former treatment for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, employing insulin-induced hypoglycemia as a method for producing convulsive seizures.
- intelligence service — the government department that is responsible for collecting and analyzing information about enemies
- intercalary meristem — meristem in the internode of a stem.
- interplanetary space — the region of space occurring around the sun and planets of the solar system. The density is normally negligible although cosmic rays, meteorites, gas clouds, etc, can occur
- into/in cold storage — If you put an idea or plan into cold storage or in cold storage, you delay it for a while rather than acting on it as you originally intended.