15-letter words containing o, c, t, f
- factory chimney — a tall chimney of a factory
- factory farming — Factory farming is a system of farming which involves keeping animals indoors, often with very little space, and giving them special foods so that they grow more quickly or produce more eggs or milk.
- faculty advisor — a member of the faculty who gives advice to students
- fahnestock clip — a type of terminal using a spring that clamps readily onto a connecting wire.
- faith community — a community of people sharing the same religious faith
- false buckthorn — a spiny shrub or small tree, Bumelia lanuginosa, of the sapodilla family, native to the southern U.S., having gummy, milky sap and white, bell-shaped flowers and yielding a hard, light-brown wood.
- fantasmagorical — Alternative form of phantasmagorical.
- fast-food chain — a chain of restaurants serving fast food
- 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.
- fault tolerance — (architecture) 1. The ability of a system or component to continue normal operation despite the presence of hardware or software faults. This often involves some degree of redundancy. 2. The number of faults a system or component can withstand before normal operation is impaired.
- feelgood factor — When journalists refer to the feelgood factor, they mean that people are feeling hopeful and optimistic about the future.
- fellow creature — a kindred creature, especially a fellow human being.
- fencepost error — 1. (Rarely "lamp-post error") A problem with the discrete equivalent of a boundary condition, often exhibited in programs by iterative loops. From the following problem: "If you build a fence 100 feet long with posts 10 feet apart, how many posts do you need?" (Either 9 or 11 is a better answer than the obvious 10). For example, suppose you have a long list or array of items, and want to process items m through n; how many items are there? The obvious answer is n - m, but that is off by one; the right answer is n - m + 1. The "obvious" formula exhibits a fencepost error. See also zeroth and note that not all off-by-one errors are fencepost errors. The game of Musical Chairs involves a catastrophic off-by-one error where N people try to sit in N - 1 chairs, but it's not a fencepost error. Fencepost errors come from counting things rather than the spaces between them, or vice versa, or by neglecting to consider whether one should count one or both ends of a row. 2. (Rare) An error induced by unexpected regularities in input values, which can (for instance) completely thwart a theoretically efficient binary tree or hash coding implementation. The error here involves the difference between expected and worst case behaviours of an algorithm.
- ferroelasticity — (physics) A phenomenon, analogous to ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity, in which spontaneous strain arises within a material.
- fibrocartilages — Plural form of fibrocartilage.
- fifth columnist — A fifth columnist is someone who secretly supports and helps the enemies of the country or organization they are in.
- fighter command — a former unit of the Royal Air Force dedicated to the use of fighter aircraft, esp against enemy bombers and their escorts during WWII
- file descriptor — (programming, operating system) An integer that identifies an open file within a process. This number is obtained as a result of opening a file. Operations which read, write, or close a file would take the file descriptor as an input parameter. In many operating system implementations, file descriptors are small integers which index a table of open files. In Unix, file descriptors 0, 1 and 2 correspond to the standard input, standard output and standard error files respectively. See file descriptor leak.
- fine-tooth comb — a comb having narrow, closely set teeth.
- finishing touch — a final additional or detail that completes and perfects something
- first-day cover — a cover marked so as to indicate that it was mailed on the first day of issue of the stamp it bears and from one of the cities at which the stamp was issued on that day.
- fishhook cactus — a large cactus, Ferocactus wislizenii, of the southwestern U.S. and Mexico, having hooked spines and red or yellow flowers.
- fission product — a nuclide produced either directly by nuclear fission or by the radioactive decay of such a nuclide
- fission reactor — a nuclear reactor in which a fission reaction takes place
- flight of fancy — An idea or statement that is very imaginative but complicated, silly, or impractical can be referred to as a flight of fancy.
- flight recorder — an electronic device aboard an aircraft that automatically records some aspects of the aircraft's performance in flight.
- floating charge — an unsecured charge on the assets of an enterprise that allows such assets to be used commercially until the enterprise ceases to operate or the creditor intervenes to demand collateral
- 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 screed — Building Trades. screed (def 3).
- florida current — the part of the Gulf Stream which extends from the Florida Strait to Cape Hatteras.
- flow of control — control flow
- focal infection — an infection in which bacteria are localized in some region, as the tonsils or the tissue around a tooth, from which they may spread to some other organ or structure of the body.
- food insecurity — an economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.
- food technology — a branch of technology that is involved in the production of food
- foolscap octavo — a book size, 41⁄4 by 63⁄4 inches
- foolscap quarto — a book size, 63⁄4 by 81⁄2 inches (foolscap quarto)
- for a certainty — without doubt
- force the issue — to compel decision on some matter
- forecastle deck — a partial weather deck on top of a forecastle superstructure; topgallant forecastle.
- forecastle head — the extreme fore part of a forecastle superstructure.
- forensic expert — an expert in applying scientific, technical or medical knowledge to the purposes of law
- fork-lift truck — Also called forklift truck, fork truck. a small vehicle with two power-operated prongs at the front that can be slid under heavy loads and then raised for moving and stacking materials in warehouses, shipping depots, etc.
- formation dance — any dance in which a number of couples form a certain arrangement, such as two facing lines or a circle, and perform a series of figures within or based on that arrangement
- forthcomingness — coming, forth, or about to come forth; about to appear; approaching in time: the forthcoming concert.
- four-ball match — a match, scored by holes, between two pairs of players, in which the four players tee off and the partners alternate in hitting the pair's ball having the better lie off the tee.
- fourth official — In football, the fourth official is an official who assists the referee and assistant referees from the side of the pitch.
- fourth republic — the republic established in France in 1945 and replaced by the Fifth Republic in 1958.
- fovea centralis — a small pit or depression at the back of the retina forming the point of sharpest vision.
- fractional note — a banknote in a denomination smaller than the standard unit of currency
- fractionalizing — Present participle of fractionalize.