26-letter words containing o, a, r, f, i
- free collective bargaining — independent negotiation between one or more trade unions and one or more employers or an employers' organization on the incomes and working conditions of the employees
- freedom of information act — a law enacted in 1966 requiring that government records except those relating to national security, confidential financial data, and law enforcement be made available to the public on request. Abbreviation: FOIA.
- general officer commanding — a general officer who holds a command position
- general protection failure — (GPF, or General Protection Fault) An addressing error, caught by the processor's memory protection hardware, that cannot be attributed to any expected condition such as a page fault.
- grand army of the republic — an organization, founded in 1866, composed of men who served in the U.S. Army and Navy during the Civil War: its last member died in 1956. Abbreviation: G.A.R.
- gulf intracoastal waterway — a mostly inland water route, partly natural and partly artificial, extending 1550 miles (2500 km) along the Atlantic coast from Boston to Florida Bay (Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway) and 1116 miles (1800 km) along the Gulf coast from Carrabelle, Fla., to Brownsville, Tex. (Gulf Intracoastal Waterway) constructed to protect small craft from the hazards of the open sea.
- hanging gardens of babylon — ornamental gardens planted on the terraces of the ziggurats of ancient Babylon.
- have one foot in the grave — an excavation made in the earth in which to bury a dead body.
- have one's fingers crossed — to hope for or against something
- headline rate of inflation — a basic rate of inflation before distorting factors have been removed
- healing by first intention — an act or instance of determining mentally upon some action or result.
- horse of a different color — a large, solid-hoofed, herbivorous quadruped, Equus caballus, domesticated since prehistoric times, bred in a number of varieties, and used for carrying or pulling loads, for riding, and for racing.
- inflammatory bowel disease — any intestinal inflammatory disease, especially Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, of unknown cause. Abbreviation: IBD.
- intimations of immortality — (Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood), a poem (1807) by Wordsworth.
- irreconcilable differences — disagreements between people, esp two married people, that cannot be resolved
- jaffer's canonical algebra — (mathematics, tool) (JACAL) A symbolic mathematics program, most of which was written in Scheme by Aubrey Jaffer.
- jefferson davis's birthday — June 3 or the first Monday in June, observed as a legal holiday in some Southern states.
- justice of the peace court — (in Scotland, formerly) a court with limited criminal jurisdiction held by justices of the peace in counties: replaced in 1975 by the district court
- knights of the round table — a legendary order of knights created by King Arthur.
- law of action and reaction — any of three laws of classical mechanics, either the law that a body remains at rest or in motion with a constant velocity unless an external force acts on the body (first law of motion) the law that the sum of the forces acting on a body is equal to the product of the mass of the body and the acceleration produced by the forces, with motion in the direction of the resultant of the forces (second law of motion) or the law that for every force acting on a body, the body exerts a force having equal magnitude and the opposite direction along the same line of action as the original force (third law of motion or law of action and reaction)
- law of diminishing returns — diminishing returns (def 2).
- law of multiple proportion — the statement that where two elements can combine to form more than one compound, the ratio by weight of one element to a given weight of the second is usually a small whole number.
- logical interchange format — (file format, file system) (LIF) A Hewlett-Packard simple file system format used to boot HP-PA machines and to interchange files between older HP machines. A LIF file system is a header, containing a single directory, with 10-character case sensitive filenames and 2-byte file types, followed by the files.
- lord of appeal in ordinary — one of the Law Lords
- make (or be) friends with — to become (or be) a friend of
- make a virtue of necessity — moral excellence; goodness; righteousness.
- master chief petty officer — a noncommissioned rank above a senior chief petty officer. Abbreviation: MCPO.
- master of the king's music — (in Britain when the sovereign is male) a court post dating from the reign of Charles I. It is an honorary title and normally held by an established English composer
- metropolitan museum of art — the principal museum in New York City: founded in 1870 and housed in its present premises in Central Park since 1880
- most-favored-nation clause — a clause in a commercial treaty or contract by which each signatory agrees to give the other the same treatment that is or will be accorded any other nation.
- multifactorial inheritance — polygenic inheritance.
- national rifle association — a lobbying organization which advocates the right to own and use firearms
- network information center — (NIC) A body that provides information, assistance and services to network users. These will typically include telephone and electronic mail "help desk" type services for users and network information services such as hostnames and addresses which are accessed automatically by computers using some client-server protocol (usually Sun's NIS). See also Network Operations Center.
- network information system — (spelling) A mis-expansion of NIS.
- new business profit margin — A new business profit margin is a system used by insurers to measure the cost of and profit from writing new policies.
- newfoundland standard time — one of the standard times used in Canada, three and a half hours behind Greenwich Mean Time
- official production system — (language) (OPS) The first production system (i.e. rule based) programming language, developed at CMU in 1970 and used for building expert systems. OPS was originally written in Franz Lisp and later ported to other LISP dialects.
- overdraft checking account — a bank account with a credit line permitting checks to be written for an amount above the account balance, subject to a finance charge on the overdraft.
- pellagra-preventive factor — nicotinic acid or its amide, nicotinamide, being the vitamin-B-complex members that serve to prevent pellagra.
- people's republic of china — People's Republic of, a country in E Asia. 3,691,502 sq. mi. (9,560,990 sq. km). Capital: Beijing.
- pick up the threads of sth — If you pick up the threads of an activity, you start it again after an interruption. If you pick up the threads of your life, you become more active again after a period of failure or bad luck.
- portable forth environment — (language) (PFE) A highly portable Forth development system based on the ANSI standard for Forth, by Dirk-Uwe Zoller of FHT, Mannheim, Germany. PFE aims to be correct, complete, usable, and simple but it isn't optimised for speed. It supports all dpANS word sets. It runs on Linux, RS/6000, and HP-UX. E-mail: Guido Draheim <[email protected]>.
- professional office system — (messaging) (PROFS) An office messaging system from IBM, used worldwide, mainly on IBM mainframes.
- purely functional language — (language) A language that supports only functional programming and does not allow functions to have side-effects. Program execution consists of evaluation of an expression and all subexpressions are referentially transparent.
- quite apart from something — used to indicate that you are aware of one aspect of a situation, but that you are going to focus on another aspect
- reformed church in america — a Protestant denomination having a Calvinist theology and originally called the Dutch Reformed Church.
- remembrance of things past — a novel (1913–27) by Marcel Proust.
- resistance transfer factor — R factor.
- scares the life out of you — If you want to emphasize that something scares you a lot, you can say that it scares the hell out of you or scares the life out of you.
- show a clean pair of heels — to run off