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17-letter words containing o, l, d

  • double refraction — the separation of a ray of light into two unequally refracted, plane-polarized rays of orthogonal polarizations, occurring in crystals in which the velocity of light rays is not the same in all directions.
  • double track line — a railway line with double track
  • double-ended bolt — a headless bolt threaded at both ends.
  • douglas engelbart — (person)   Douglas C. Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse. On 1968-12-09, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, USA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the on live system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse, hypertext, object addressing, dynamic file linking and shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface. The original 90-minute video: Hyperlinks, Mouse, Web-board.
  • douglas macarthur — Douglas, 1880–1964, U.S. general: supreme commander of allied forces in SW Pacific during World War II and of UN forces in Korea 1950–51.
  • down the plughole — If you say that something has gone down the plughole, you mean that it has failed or has been lost or wasted.
  • down-at-the-heels — of a shabby, run-down appearance; seedy: He is rapidly becoming a down-at-heel drifter and a drunk.
  • downward mobility — movement from one social level to a higher one (upward mobility) or a lower one (downward mobility) as by changing jobs or marrying.
  • downwardly mobile — See under vertical mobility (def 1).
  • downwardly-mobile — See under vertical mobility (def 1).
  • drained of colour — colourless
  • drilling platform — a structure, either fixed to the sea bed or mobile, which supports the machinery and equipment (the drilling rig), together with the stores, required for digging an offshore oil well
  • drive to the wall — to force into an awkward situation
  • drive-by download — an incidence of an unwanted program being automatically downloaded to a computer, often without the user's knowledge
  • drool-proof paper — (jargon)   Documentation that has been obsessively dumbed down, to the point where only a cretin could bear to read it, is said to have succumbed to the "drool-proof paper syndrome" or to have been "written on drool-proof paper". For example, this is an actual quote from Apple Computer's LaserWriter manual: "Do not expose your LaserWriter to open fire or flame."
  • drop on the floor — To react to an error condition by silently discarding messages or other valuable data. "The gateway ran out of memory, so it just started dropping packets on the floor." Also frequently used of faulty mail and netnews relay sites that lose messages. See also black hole, bit bucket.
  • drop one's bundle — several objects or a quantity of material gathered or bound together: a bundle of hay.
  • droplet infection — infection spread by airborne droplets of secretions from the nose, throat, or lungs.
  • due course of law — the regular administration of the law, according to which no citizen may be denied his or her legal rights and all laws must conform to fundamental, accepted legal principles, as the right of the accused to confront his or her accusers.
  • early closing day — a day on which most shops in a town or area close after lunch
  • east indian lotus — a southern Asian lotus, Nelumbo nucifera, of the water lily family, having fragrant pink or rose flowers.
  • economic blockade — an embargo on trade with a country, esp one which prohibits receipt of exports from that country, with the intention of disrupting the country's economy
  • electricity board — a company which supplies electricity
  • electrocardiogram — A record or display of a person’s heartbeat produced by electrocardiography.
  • electrodeposition — The deposition of a metal on a cathode during electrolysis; used as a method of purification.
  • employee discount — When the employees of a store or other retail business are entitled to an employee discount, they do not have to pay the full price for goods they buy in the store.
  • employer-provided — Employer-provided insurance is arranged or funded by the organization for which the policyholder works.
  • english shellcode — (security)   A kind of malware that is embedded in ordinary English sentences. English shellcode attempts to avoid detection by antivirus software by making the code resemble, e.g. e-mail text or Wikipedia entries. It was first revealed by researchers at Johns Hopkins.
  • enlarged prostate — disorder of male reproductive gland
  • epicycloidal gear — a gear of an epicyclic train
  • epidemiologically — With regard to epidemiology.
  • equalization fund — a monetary reserve established by a country to provide funds for maintaining the official exchange rates of its currency by equalizing the buying and selling of foreign exchange.
  • ethernet meltdown — A network meltdown on Ethernet.
  • ethinyloestradiol — Alternative form of ethinylestradiol.
  • exception handler — Special code which is called when an exception occurs during the execution of a program. If the programmer does not provide a handler for a given exception, a built-in system exception handler will usually be called resulting in abortion of the program run and some kind of error indication being returned to the user. Examples of exception handler mechanisms are Unix's signal calls and Lisp's catch and throw.
  • exceptional child — a gifted child
  • explosion welding — the welding of two parts forced together by a controlled explosion
  • eyelet embroidery — a piece of embroidery decorated with such work
  • fall on deaf ears — the organ of hearing and equilibrium in vertebrates, in humans consisting of an external ear that gathers sound vibrations, a middle ear in which the vibrations resonate against the tympanic membrane, and a fluid-filled internal ear that maintains balance and that conducts the tympanic vibrations to the auditory nerve, which transmits them as impulses to the brain.
  • falling diphthong — a diphthong in which the first of the two apparent vocalic elements is of greater stress or sonority and the second is of lesser stress or sonority, as in (ī), (ou), (oi), etc.
  • fear and loathing — (Hunter S. Thompson) A state inspired by the prospect of dealing with certain real-world systems and standards that are totally brain-damaged but ubiquitous - Intel 8086s, COBOL, EBCDIC, or any IBM machine except the Rios (also known as the RS/6000).
  • fendalton tractor — a four-wheel drive recreational vehicle
  • field post office — a place to which mail intended for military units in the field is sent to be sorted and forwarded
  • field sales force — a team of people selling a product or service in the field as opposed to over the telephone, etc
  • first-order logic — (language, logic)   The language describing the truth of mathematical formulas. Formulas describe properties of terms and have a truth value. The following are atomic formulas: True False p(t1,..tn) where t1,..,tn are terms and p is a predicate. If F1, F2 and F3 are formulas and v is a variable then the following are compound formulas: The "order" of a logic specifies what entities "For all" and "Exists" may quantify over. First-order logic can only quantify over sets of atomic propositions. (E.g. For all p . p => p). Second-order logic can quantify over functions on propositions, and higher-order logic can quantify over any type of entity. The sets over which quantifiers operate are usually implicit but can be deduced from well-formedness constraints. In first-order logic quantifiers always range over ALL the elements of the domain of discourse. By contrast, second-order logic allows one to quantify over subsets.
  • flagrante delicto — Law. in the very act of committing the offense.
  • floating dry dock — a dock that floats and can be lowered in the water for the entrance of a ship, and then raised for use as a dry dock
  • flog a dead horse — 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.
  • floppy disk drive — disk drive
  • flowering dogwood — a North American dogwood tree, Cornus florida, having small greenish flowers in the spring, surrounded by white or pink bracts that resemble petals: the state flower and the state tree of Virginia.
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