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21-letter words containing o, r, a, e

  • to look the other way — If you say that someone looks the other way, you are critical of them because they pay no attention to something unpleasant that is happening, when they should be dealing with it properly.
  • to mix your metaphors — If you mix your metaphors, you use two conflicting metaphors. People do this accidentally, or sometimes deliberately as a joke.
  • 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 sink without trace — If you say that someone or something sinks without trace or sinks without a trace, you mean that they stop existing or stop being successful very suddenly and completely.
  • to take the high road — to take the course of action which is safest and most familiar
  • to take your mind off — If something takes your mind off a problem or unpleasant situation, it helps you to forget about it for a while.
  • topgallant forecastle — a partial weather deck on top of a forecastle superstructure; forecastle deck.
  • total recoverable gas — Total recoverable gas is the amount of gas which is still left in the ground in gas fields that have already been worked.
  • total recoverable oil — Total recoverable oil is the amount of oil which is still left in the ground in oilfields that have already been worked.
  • toussaint l'ouverture — François Dominique [frahn-swa dawmee-neek] /frɑ̃ˈswa dɔmiˈnik/ (Show IPA), 1743–1803, Haitian patriot and leader of the Haitian Revolution slave rebellion.
  • trades union congress — The Trades Union Congress in Britain is the same as the TUC.
  • traffic control tower — an elevated structure for the visual observation and control of the air and ground traffic at an airport
  • transformational rule — Linguistics. a rule of transformational grammar that relates two phrase markers in the course of a derivation from the deep to the surface syntactic representation of a sentence, as by reordering, inserting, or deleting elements; a rule that converts deep structures into surface structures.
  • transport segregation — Transport segregation is when particles from a mixture separate because the mixture vibrates while it is being moved.
  • traveling salesperson — a representative of a business firm who travels in an assigned territory soliciting orders for a company's services.
  • trichloroacetaldehyde — chloral (def 1).
  • trichloronitromethane — chloropicrin.
  • triethyl orthoformate — a colorless liquid, C 7 H 16 O 3 , used chiefly in organic synthesis.
  • triple superphosphate — superphosphate (def 2).
  • triple-superphosphate — Also called acid phosphate. a mixture of calcium acid phosphate and calcium sulfate prepared by treating phosphate rock with sulfuric acid: used chiefly as a fertilizer.
  • tumor necrosis factor — a protein, produced in humans and other animals, that is destructive to cells showing abnormally rapid growth: identical with cachectin. Abbreviation: TNF.
  • turn up one's nose at — to sneer at; scorn
  • uk overseas territory — any of the territories that are governed by the UK but lie outside the British Isles; many were formerly British crown colonies: includes Bermuda, Falkland Islands, and Montserrat
  • ulster unionist party — a Northern Irish political party advocating the maintenance of union with the UK
  • ultraviolet astronomy — the branch of astronomy that deals with celestial objects emitting electromagnetic radiation in the ultraviolet range.
  • under one's own steam — If you do something under your own steam, you do it without any help from anyone else.
  • uniform business rate — a local tax in the UK paid by businesses, based on a local valuation of their premises and a rate fixed by central government that applies throughout the country
  • uniform resource name — (web)   (URN, previously Uniform/Universal Resource Number) 1. Any URI which is not a URL. 2. A particular scheme which is currently (1991-4) under development by the IETF, which should provide for the resolution using Internet protocols of names which have a greater persistence than that currently associated with Internet host names or organisations (as used in URLs). Uniform Resource Names will be URI schemes that improve on URLs in reliability over time, including authenticity, replication, and high availability. When defined, a URN in sense 1 will be an example of a URN in sense 2.
  • 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 arizona — (body, education)   The University was founded in 1885 as a Land Grant institution with a three-fold mission of teaching, research and public service. Today, the University is one of the top 20 research universities in the nation, with a student enrollment of more than 35,000, a faculty and staff of 12,500, and a 345-acre campus. Address: Tucson, Arizona, USA.
  • university of iceland — (body, education)   The Home of Fjolnir.
  • up close and personal — face to face, intimately
  • venus's flower basket — a glass sponge of the genus Euplectella, inhabiting deep waters off the Philippines and Japan, having a cylindrical skeleton formed of an intricate latticework of siliceous spicules.
  • virtual memory system — (operating system)   (VMS) DEC's proprietary operating system originally produced for its VAX minicomputer. VMS V1 was released in August 1978. VMS was renamed "OpenVMS" around version 5.5. The first version of VMS on DEC Alpha was known as OpenVMS for AXP V1.0, and the correct way to refer to the operating system now is OpenVMS for VAX or OpenVMS for Alpha. The renaming also signified the fact that the X/Open consortium had certified OpenVMS as having a high support for POSIX standards. VMS is one of the most secure operating systems on the market (making it popular in financial institutions). It currently (October 1997) has the best clustering capability (both number and distance) and is very scalable with binaries portable from small desktop workstations up to huge mainframes. Many Unix fans generously concede that VMS would probably be the hacker's favourite commercial OS if Unix didn't exist; though true, this makes VMS fans furious.
  • 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.
  • voice-stress analyzer — a machine purported to detect stress in a human voice and to ascertain a person's truthfulness.
  • voluntary arrangement — a procedure enabling an insolvent company to come to an arrangement with its creditors and resolve its financial problems, often in compliance with a court order
  • volunteers of america — a religious reform and relief organization, similar to the Salvation Army, founded in New York City in 1896 by Ballington Booth, son of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. Abbreviation: VOA.
  • warm silence software — A small company run by(?) Robin Watts, producing software for the Acorn Archimedes.
  • water of constitution — water present in a molecule that cannot be removed without disrupting the molecule.
  • 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:
  • weinberg-salam theory — electroweak theory.
  • what price something? — what are the chances of something happening now?
  • what the future holds — If you wonder what the future holds, you wonder what will happen in the future.
  • whip-and-tongue graft — a graft prepared by cutting both the scion and the stock in a sloping direction and inserting a tongue in the scion into a slit in the stock.
  • white-crowned sparrow — a North American sparrow, Zonotrichia leucophrys, having black and white stripes on the head.
  • 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
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