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20-letter words containing o, f, c, u, t

  • frontenac et palluau — Comte de (Louis de Buade) 1620?–98, French governor of New France 1672–82, 1689–98.
  • fulminate of mercury — a gray, crystalline solid, Hg(CNO) 2 , used chiefly in the manufacture of commercial and military detonators.
  • fulminating compound — a fulminate.
  • function application — A function applied to (some of) its arguments. If it is not applied to all its argument then it is a "partial application". Application is usually written in the form f(x) but some languages such as command-line interpreters and many functional languages use juxtaposition: f x. Lisp places the parentheses around the whole application: (f x).
  • fundamental constant — a physical constant, such as the gravitational constant or speed of light, that plays a fundamental role in physics and chemistry and usually has an accurately known value
  • infectious hepatitis — hepatitis A.
  • inferior conjunction — the alignment of an inferior planet between the sun and the earth.
  • instruction prefetch — (architecture)   A technique which attempts to minimise the time a processor spends waiting for instructions to be fetched from memory. Instructions following the one currently being executed are loaded into a prefetch queue when the processor's external bus is otherwise idle. If the processor executes a branch instruction or receives an interrupt then the queue must be flushed and reloaded from the new address. Instruction prefetch is often combined with pipelining in an attempt to keep the pipeline busy. By 1995 most processors used prefetching, e.g. Motorola 680x0, Intel 80x86.
  • isochronous transfer — isochronous
  • joint life insurance — life insurance covering two or more persons, the benefits of which are paid after the first person dies.
  • joule-thomson effect — the change of temperature that a gas exhibits during a throttling process, shown by passing the gas through a small aperture or porous plug into a region of low pressure.
  • justice of the peace — a local public officer, usually having jurisdiction to try and determine minor civil and criminal cases and to hold preliminary examinations of persons accused of more serious crimes, and having authority to administer oaths, solemnize marriages, etc.
  • justifiable homicide — murder committed under extenuating circumstances
  • kentucky coffee tree — a tall North American tree, Gymnocladus dioica, of the legume family, the seeds of which (Kentucky coffee beans) were formerly used as a substitute for coffee beans.
  • knock out of the box — to make so many hits against (an opposing pitcher) as to cause the pitcher's removal
  • knock the tar out of — any of various dark-colored viscid products obtained by the destructive distillation of certain organic substances, as coal or wood.
  • life-support machine — A life-support machine is the equipment that is used to keep a person alive when they are very ill and cannot breathe without help.
  • lighthouse coffeepot — a coffeepot of the late 17th and 18th centuries, having a tapering, circular body with a domed lid.
  • logarithmic function — a function defined by y = log bx, especially when the base, b, is equal to e, the base of natural logarithms.
  • mary, queen of scots — family name Stuart. 1542–87, queen of Scotland (1542–67); daughter of James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise. She was married to Francis II of France (1558–60), her cousin Lord Darnley (1565–67), and the Earl of Bothwell (1567–71), who was commonly regarded as Darnley's murderer. She was forced to abdicate in favour of her son (later James VI of Scotland) and fled to England. Imprisoned by Elizabeth I until 1587, she was beheaded for plotting against the English crown
  • member of the public — a member of the general population
  • music of the spheres — a music, imperceptible to human ears, formerly supposed to be produced by the movements of the spheres or heavenly bodies.
  • obfuscated c contest — (programming)   The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) is an annual contest run since 1984 over Usenet by Landon Curt Noll and friends. The overall winner is whoever produces the most unreadable, creative, and bizarre (but working) C program. Various other prizes are awarded at the judges' whim. C's terse syntax and macro-preprocessor facilities give contestants a lot of maneuvering room. The winning programs often manage to be simultaneously funny, breathtaking works of art and horrible examples of how *not* to code in C. This relatively short and sweet hello, world program demonstrates obfuscated C: /* HELLO WORLD program * by Jack Applin and Robert Heckendorn, 1985 */ main(v,c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Hello, world!\n)"; (!!c)[*c]&&(v--||--c&&execlp(*c,*c,c[!!c]+!!c,!c)); **c=!c)write(!!*c,*c,!!**c);} Here's another good one: /* Program to compute an approximation of pi * by Brian Westley, 1988 */ #define _ -F<00||--F-OO--; int F=00,OO=00; main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO() { _-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_ } Note that this program works by computing its own area. For more digits, write a bigger program.
  • occupation franchise — the right of a tenant to vote in national and local elections
  • of no/little account — If you say that something is of no account or of little account, you mean that it is very unimportant and is not worth considering.
  • officer of the guard — an officer, acting under the officer of the day, who is responsible for the instruction, discipline, and performance of duty of the guard in a post, camp, or station. Abbreviation: OG, O.G.
  • ousterhout's fallacy — Ousterhout's dichotomy
  • paper qualifications — qualifications gained through official examinations, etc, rather than through experience
  • particulars of claim — (in England) the first reading made by the claimant in a county court action, showing the facts upon which he or she relies in support of a claim and the relief asked for
  • peaceful coexistence — competition without war, or a policy of peace between nations of widely differing political systems and ideologies, especially between Communist and non-Communist nations: peaceful coexistence between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
  • person of no account — (University of California at Santa Cruz) Used when referring to a person with no network address, frequently to forestall confusion. Most often as part of an introduction: "This is Bill, a person of no account, but he used to be [email protected]". Compare return from the dead.
  • polymorphic function — a function in a computer program that can deal with a number of different types of data
  • prefecture apostolic — a territory in the early stage of missionary development.
  • probability function — the function the values of which are probabilities of the distinct outcomes of a discrete random variable
  • recursive definition — a definition consisting of a set of rules such that by repeated application of the rules the meaning of the definiendum is uniquely determined in terms of ideas that are already familiar.
  • request for comments — (standard)   (RFC) One of a series, begun in 1969, of numbered Internet informational documents and standards widely followed by commercial software and freeware in the Internet and Unix communities. Few RFCs are standards but all Internet standards are recorded in RFCs. Perhaps the single most influential RFC has been RFC 822, the Internet electronic mail format standard. The RFCs are unusual in that they are floated by technical experts acting on their own initiative and reviewed by the Internet at large, rather than formally promulgated through an institution such as ANSI. For this reason, they remain known as RFCs even once adopted as standards. The RFC tradition of pragmatic, experience-driven, after-the-fact standard writing done by individuals or small working groups has important advantages over the more formal, committee-driven process typical of ANSI or ISO. Emblematic of some of these advantages is the existence of a flourishing tradition of "joke" RFCs; usually at least one a year is published, usually on April 1st. Well-known joke RFCs have included 527 ("ARPAWOCKY", R. Merryman, UCSD; 22 June 1973), 748 ("Telnet Randomly-Lose Option", Mark R. Crispin; 1 April 1978), and 1149 ("A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers", D. Waitzman, BBN STC; 1 April 1990). The first was a Lewis Carroll pastiche; the second a parody of the TCP/IP documentation style, and the third a deadpan skewering of standards-document legalese, describing protocols for transmitting Internet data packets by carrier pigeon. The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work - they manage to have neither the ambiguities that are usually rife in informal specifications, nor the committee-perpetrated misfeatures that often haunt formal standards, and they define a network that has grown to truly worldwide proportions. See also For Your Information, STD.
  • shifting cultivation — a land-use system, esp in tropical Africa, in which a tract of land is cultivated until its fertility diminishes, when it is abandoned until this is restored naturally
  • sodium fluoroacetate — a white, amorphous, water-soluble, poisonous powder, C 2 H 2 FO 2 Na, used as a rodenticide.
  • soft gelatin capsule — A soft gelatin capsule is a type of capsule that is usually used to contain medicine in the form of liquid or powder, and which dissolves more quickly than a hard gelatin capsule.
  • specific conductance — conductivity (def 2).
  • specific-conductance — conductivity (def 2).
  • staff of aesculapius — a representation of a forked staff with an entwining serpent, used as a symbol of the medical profession and as the insignia of the American Medical Association and other medical organizations. Compare caduceus (def 2).
  • states of the church — Papal States
  • strong nuclear force — an interaction between elementary particles responsible for the forces between nucleons in the nucleus. It operates at distances less than about 10–15 metres, and is about a hundred times more powerful than the electromagnetic interaction
  • sufficient condition — a statement whose truth is sufficient to guarantee the truth of a given statement
  • tchebycheff equation — a differential equation of the form (1 − x 2) d 2 y/dx 2 − x dy/dx + n 2 y = 0, where n is any nonnegative integer.
  • the course of nature — the ordinary course of events
  • the gnomes of zurich — Swiss bankers and financiers
  • the luck of the draw — If you say that something is the luck of the draw, you mean that it is the result of chance and you cannot do anything about it.
  • thomas of erceldoune — Thomas of, Thomas of Erceldoune.
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