21-letter words containing o, d, r, l
- the yellow brick road — the road to success or happiness (in the film the Wizard of Oz the yellow brick road leads to Oz)
- thermal decomposition — Thermal decomposition is the process in which a chemical species breaks down when its temperature is increased.
- threshold wage policy — a policy whereby wages are increased in accordance with inflation
- to be hard luck on sb — to be unfortunate or unlucky for someone
- to be killed outright — If someone is killed outright, they die immediately, for example in an accident.
- to kill a mockingbird — a novel (1960) by Harper Lee.
- to lay down your life — If someone lays down their life for another person, they die so that the other person can live.
- to let your hair down — If you let your hair down, you relax completely and enjoy yourself.
- to play the race card — if someone plays the race card they bring up the issue of race in a discussion, perhaps for sympathy or to seek popularity by appealing to racist sentiment
- to rear its ugly head — If something unpleasant rears its head or rears its ugly head, it becomes visible or noticeable.
- to risk life and limb — If someone risks life and limb, they do something very dangerous that may cause them to die or be seriously injured.
- to rub shoulders with — If you rub shoulders with famous people, you meet them and talk to them. You can also say that you rub elbows with someone, especially in American English.
- to sow your wild oats — If a young person sows their wild oats, they behave in a rather uncontrolled way, especially by having a lot of sexual relationships.
- trichloroacetaldehyde — chloral (def 1).
- universal disk format — (storage, standard) (UDF) A CD-ROM file system standard that is required for DVD ROMs. UDF is the OSTA's replacement for the ISO 9660 file system used on CD-ROMs, but will be mostly used on DVD. DVD multimedia disks use UDF to contain MPEG audio and video streams. To read DVDs you need a DVD drive, the kernel driver for the drive, MPEG video support, and a UDF driver. DVDs containing both UDF filesystems and ISO 9660 filesystems can be read without UDF support. UDF can also be used by CD-R and CD-RW recorders in packet writing mode.
- university of iceland — (body, education) The Home of Fjolnir.
- up close and personal — face to face, intimately
- ventriloquist's dummy — a puppet which is operated by a ventriloquist and made to appear to talk
- vladivostok agreement — a preliminary arms control accord concluded by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and U.S. President Gerald Ford in Vladivostok, U.S.S.R., in December 1974.
- voluntary liquidation — the process of voluntarily terminating the affairs of a business, firm, etc, by realizing its assets to discharge its liabilities or the state of a business firm, etc, having its affairs so terminated
- weak head normal form — (reduction, theory) (WHNF) A lambda expression is in weak head normal form (WHNF) if it is a head normal form (HNF) or any lambda abstraction. I.e. the top level is not a redex. The term was coined by Simon Peyton Jones to make explicit the difference between head normal form (HNF) and what graph reduction systems produce in practice. A lambda abstraction with a reducible body, e.g. \ x . ((\ y . y+x) 2) is in WHNF but not HNF. To reduce this expression to HNF would require reduction of the lambda body: (\ y . y+x) 2 --> 2+x Reduction to WHNF avoids the name capture problem with its need for alpha conversion of an inner lambda abstraction and so is preferred in practical graph reduction systems. The same principle is often used in strict languages such as Scheme to provide call-by-name evaluation by wrapping an expression in a lambda abstraction with no arguments: D = delay E = \ () . E The value of the expression is obtained by applying it to the empty argument list:
- well-ordering theorem — the theorem of set theory that every set can be made a well-ordered set.
- wet collodion process — a photographic process, in common use in the mid-19th century, employing a glass photographic plate coated with iodized collodion and dipped in a silver nitrate solution immediately before use.
- what the future holds — If you wonder what the future holds, you wonder what will happen in the future.
- wholesale price index — an indicator of price changes in the wholesale market
- wildlife photographer — someone that specializes in taking photographs of wild animals, especially in their natural habitats, and plants
- yellow lady's-slipper — a showy orchid, Cypripedium calceolus, of eastern North America, having purple-tinged yellow flowers with an inflated lip petal.
- yellow mercuric oxide — a slightly crystalline, water-soluble, poisonous compound, HgO, occurring as a coarse, orange-red powder (red mercuric oxide) or as a fine, orange-yellow powder (yellow mercuric oxide) used chiefly as a pigment in paints and as an antiseptic in pharmaceuticals.
- yellow-flowered gourd — the hard-shelled fruit of any of various plants, especially those of Lagenaria siceraria (white-flowered gourd or bottle gourd) whose dried shell is used for bowls and other utensils, and Cucurbita pepo (yellow-flowered gourd) used ornamentally. Compare gourd family.
- yellow-rumped warbler — a common North American wood warbler, Dendroica coronata, having yellow spots on the rump, crown, and sides, including a white-throated eastern subspecies (myrtle warbler) and a yellow-throated western subspecies (Audubon's warbler)
- yellow-throated vireo — an olive-green vireo, Vireo flavifrons, of eastern North America, having a bright yellow throat and breast.