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15-letter words containing n, o, p, l

  • family grouping — a system, used usually in the infant school, of grouping children of various ages together, esp for project work
  • fatal exception — (programming, operating system)   A program execution error which is trapped by the operating system and which results in abrupt termination of the program. It may be possible for the program to catch some such errors, e.g. a floating point underflow; others, such as an invalid memory access (an attempt to write to read-only memory or an attempt to read memory outside of the program's address space), may always cause control to pass to the operating system without allowing the program an opportunity to handle the error. The details depend on the language's run-time system and the operating system. See also: fatal error.
  • flange coupling — a driving coupling between rotating shafts that consists of flanges (or half couplings) one of which is fixed at the end of each shaft, the two flanges being bolted together with a ring of bolts to complete the drive
  • flapping router — (networking)   A router that transmits routing updates alternately advertising a destination network first via one route, then via a different route. Flapping routers are identified on more advanced protocol analysers such as the Network General (TM) Sniffer.
  • floating policy — (in marine insurance) a policy that provides protection of a broad nature for shipments of merchandise and that is valid continuously until canceled.
  • floating supply — the aggregate supply of ready-to-market goods or securities.
  • floral envelope — the calyx and corolla of a flower.
  • flowering maple — any of various shrubs belonging to the genus Abutilon, of the mallow family, having large, bright-colored flowers.
  • flowering plant — a plant that produces flowers, fruit, and seeds; angiosperm.
  • food supplement — a substance designed to make up for a deficiency in one's diet
  • fore-topgallant — being a sail, yard, or rigging belonging to a fore-topgallant mast.
  • full employment — all of workforce is employed
  • full-moon maple — Japanese maple.
  • funeral parlour — A funeral parlour is a place where a funeral director works and where dead people are prepared for burial or cremation.
  • galloping-ghost — Harold ("Red"; "the Galloping Ghost") 1903–1991, U.S. football player.
  • galvanic couple — voltaic couple.
  • gaming platform — a computer system specially made for playing video games; a console: The new gaming platforms have much better graphics resolution than previous generation consoles.
  • gender politics — debate about the roles and relations of men and women
  • general-purpose — useful in many ways; not limited in use or function: a good general-purpose dictionary.
  • geneva protocol — the agreement in 1925 to ban the use of asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases in war. It does not ban the development or manufacture of such gases
  • get one's lumps — a piece or mass of solid matter without regular shape or of no particular shape: a lump of coal.
  • glazier's point — a small, pointed piece of sheet metal, for holding a pane of glass in a sash until the putty has hardened.
  • go up in flames — be burned
  • golden eardrops — a Californian plant, Dicentra chrysantha, of the fumitory family, having bluish-green foliage and branched clusters of yellow flowers.
  • golden pheasant — an Asiatic pheasant, Chrysolophus pictus, having brilliant scarlet, orange, gold, green, and black plumage.
  • golden samphire — a Eurasian coastal plant, Inula crithmoides, with fleshy leaves and yellow flower heads: family Asteraceae (composites)
  • gramophonically — in a gramophonic manner
  • grand old party — G.O.P.
  • graph colouring — (application)   A constraint-satisfaction problem often used as a test case in research, which also turns out to be equivalent to certain real-world problems (e.g. register allocation). Given a connected graph and a fixed number of colours, the problem is to assign a colour to each node, subject to the constraint that any two connected nodes cannot be assigned the same colour. This is an example of an NP-complete problem. See also four colour map theorem.
  • grecian profile — a profile distinguished by the absence of the hollow between the upper ridge of the nose and the forehead, thereby forming a straight line.
  • groundwood pulp — wood pulp consisting of groundwood that has not been cooked or chemically treated, used for making newsprint and other poorer grades of paper.
  • halting problem — The problem of determining in advance whether a particular program or algorithm will terminate or run forever. The halting problem is the canonical example of a provably unsolvable problem. Obviously any attempt to answer the question by actually executing the algorithm or simulating each step of its execution will only give an answer if the algorithm under consideration does terminate, otherwise the algorithm attempting to answer the question will itself run forever. Some special cases of the halting problem are partially solvable given sufficient resources. For example, if it is possible to record the complete state of the execution of the algorithm at each step and the current state is ever identical to some previous state then the algorithm is in a loop. This might require an arbitrary amount of storage however. Alternatively, if there are at most N possible different states then the algorithm can run for at most N steps without looping. A program analysis called termination analysis attempts to answer this question for limited kinds of input algorithm.
  • hapax legomenon — a word or phrase that appears only once in a manuscript, document, or particular area of literature.
  • haulage company — a firm that transports goods by lorry
  • help oneself to — to serve or provide oneself with (food, etc.)
  • hexachlorophene — a white, crystalline powder, C 13 Cl 6 H 6 O 2 , insoluble in water: used as an antibacterial agent chiefly in toothpastes and soaps.
  • holding company — a company that controls other companies through stock ownership but that usually does not engage directly in their productive operations (distinguished from parent company).
  • holding paddock — a paddock in which cattle or sheep are kept temporarily, as before shearing, etc
  • holding pattern — a traffic pattern for aircraft at a specified location (holding point) where they are ordered to remain until permitted to land or proceed.
  • hopeful monster — a hypothetical individual organism that, by means of a fortuitous macromutation permitting an adaptive shift to a new mode of life, becomes the founder of a new type of organism and a vehicle of macroevolution.
  • hospital corner — a fold on a bed sheet or blanket made by tucking the foot or head of the sheet straight under the mattress with the ends protruding and then making a diagonal fold at the side corner of the sheet and tucking this under to produce a triangular corner.
  • hospitalisation — (British) alternative spelling of hospitalization.
  • hospitalization — the act, process, or state of being hospitalized.
  • humpback salmon — a pink salmon inhabiting North Pacific waters: so-called because of the hump that appears behind the head of the male when it is ready for spawning.
  • hunting leopard — the cheetah.
  • hurdle champion — a hurdler who has defeated all others in a competition
  • hyper-emotional — pertaining to or involving emotion or the emotions.
  • hyperbolic sine — one of a group of functions of an angle expressed as a relationship between the distances of a point on a hyperbola to the origin and to the coordinate axes; sinh
  • hyperfunctional — of or relating to a function or functions: functional difficulties in the administration.
  • hyperinvolution — a decrease in the size of an organ following enlargement, usually used to describe the shrinking of the uterus after childbirth
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