18-letter words containing i, r, e, t
- for the time being — the system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future; indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another.
- forced perspective — the use of objects or images that are larger or smaller than they should be, to suggest that they are nearer or further away than they really are
- fore-edge painting — a technique of painting a picture on the fore edge of a book, often in such a manner that only when the pages are slightly fanned the picture is revealed.
- foreign investment — investment from foreign countries
- foreign-trade zone — free port (def 1).
- forensic chemistry — the application of facts concerning chemistry to questions of civil and criminal law.
- forensic scientist — science expert: provides evidence
- forgive and forget — be reconciled
- forward compatible — forward compatibility
- foundation garment — an undergarment, as a girdle or corset, worn by women to support or give shape to the contours of the body.
- fragmentation bomb — a bomb designed to break into many small, high-velocity fragments when detonated.
- french west africa — a former French federation in W Africa, including Dahomey (now Benin), French Guinea, French Sudan (now Mali), Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Upper Volta (now Burkina Fasso).
- french west indies — islands in the West Indies that belong to France, including two overseas departments (Martinique & Guadeloupe) & several former dependencies of Guadeloupe
- frequency function — probability density function (def 2).
- fringe-toed lizard — an iguanid lizard, Uma notata, of sandy deserts of the western U.S. and Mexico, having a wedge-shaped snout and toes fringed with long, pointed scales.
- ftp software, inc. — (company) Developers of the original PC/TCP Packet Driver specification. Address: 26 Princess St. Wakefield, MA 01880-3004. Telephone: +1 (617) 246 0900.
- fulminating powder — powder that explodes by percussion.
- funding operations — the conversion of government floating stock or short-term debt into holdings of long-term bonds
- 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.
- garden loosestrife — any of various plants belonging to the genus Lysimachia, of the primrose family, having clusters of usually yellow flowers, as L. vulgaris (garden loosestrife) or L. quadrifolia (whorled loosestrife)
- gas-discharge tube — any tube in which an electric discharge takes place through a gas
- gastroenterologist — the study of the structure, functions, and diseases of digestive organs.
- geiger-muller tube — a tube functioning as an ionization chamber within a Geiger counter.
- general anesthesia — induced unconsciousness
- general relativity — the state or fact of being relative.
- general san martin — a city in E Argentina, a suburb of Buenos Aires.
- generating station — a power station
- generative grammar — a linguistic theory that attempts to describe the tacit knowledge that a native speaker has of a language by establishing a set of explicit, formalized rules that specify or generate all the possible grammatical sentences of a language, while excluding all unacceptable sentences. Compare transformational grammar.
- generic identifier — (language, text) A string constituting the name of a element in an SGML document.
- genetic algorithms — genetic algorithm
- gensym corporation — (company) A company that supplies software and services for intelligent operations management. Common applications include quality management, process optimisation, dynamic scheduling, network management, energy and environmental management, and process modelling and simulation. Their products include G2.
- geodetic surveying — the surveying of the earth's surface, making allowance for its curvature and giving an accurate framework for smaller-scale surveys
- geometrical optics — the branch of optics dealing with light as rays, especially in the study of the effects of lenses and mirrors on light beams and of their combination in optical instruments.
- german east africa — a former German territory in E Africa, the area now comprised of continental Tanzania and the independent republics of Rwanda and Burundi.
- germline insertion — the insertion of cloned genes into the egg or sperm cell of an organism, using a gene transfer technique, in order to perpetuate a desired trait in its descendants, as pest-resistance in a crop plant.
- get one's irish up — of, relating to, or characteristic of Ireland, its inhabitants, or their language.
- 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
- give sb the creeps — If someone or something gives you the creeps, they make you feel very nervous or frightened.
- give sb their head — If you give someone their head, you allow them to do what they want to do, without trying to advise or stop them.
- glomerulonephritis — a kidney disease affecting the capillaries of the glomeruli, characterized by albuminuria, edema, and hypertension.
- glyceryl trioleate — olein.
- gnu superoptimiser — (GSO) A function sequence generator that uses an exhaustive generate-and-test approach to find the shortest instruction sequence for a given function. Written by Torbjorn Granlund <[email protected]> and Tom Wood. You have to tell the superoptimiser which function and which CPU you want to get code for. This is useful for compiler writers. FTP superopt-2.2.tar.Z from a GNU archive site. Generates code for DEC Alpha, SPARC, Intel 80386, 88000, RS/6000, 68000, 29000 and Pyramid (SP, AP and XP).
- go with the stream — to conform to the accepted standards
- going to jerusalem — musical chairs.
- golden gate bridge — a bridge connecting N California with San Francisco peninsula. 4200-foot (1280-meter) center span.
- golden opportunity — perfect chance
- government deficit — A government deficit is a situation in which a government spends more money than it has.
- 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
- graduated cylinder — a narrow, cylindrical container marked with horizontal lines to represent units of measurement and used to precisely measure the volume of liquids.
- grammatical gender — gender based on arbitrary assignment, without regard to the referent of a noun, as in French le livre (masculine), “the book,” and German das Mädchen (neuter), “the girl.”.