21-letter words containing o, v, a, l, i
- light armored vehicle — an eight-wheeled armored reconnaissance car with a 25mm cannon, in service with the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in the 1980s.
- live to tell the tale — If you survive a dangerous or frightening experience and so are able to tell people about it afterwards, you can say that you lived to tell the tale.
- magneto-optical drive — magneto-optical disk
- maximum value theorem — the theorem that for a real-valued function f whose domain is a compact set, there is at least one element x in the domain of f for which f (x) achieves its largest value.
- mohammed reza pahlavi — 1919-80; shah of Iran (1941-79); deposed
- motivational research — the application of the knowledge and techniques of the social sciences, especially psychology and sociology, to understanding consumer attitudes and behavior: used as a guide in advertising and marketing.
- national park service — a division of the Department of the Interior, created in 1916, that administers national parks, monuments, historic sites, and recreational areas.
- national savings bank — (in Britain) a government savings bank, run through the post office, esp for small savers
- nonproportional cover — Nonproportional cover is reinsurance cover such as excess of loss reinsurance where the reinsurer's liability is not calculated as a proportion of the insurance.
- nonrestrictive clause — a relative clause that describes or supplements but is not essential in establishing the identity of the antecedent and is usually set off by commas in English. In This year, which has been dry, is bad for crops the clause which has been dry is a nonrestrictive clause.
- nonviolent resistance — passive resistance, peaceful protest
- objective correlative — a completely depicted situation or chain of events that objectifies a particular emotion in such a way as to produce or evoke that emotion in the reader.
- observation satellite — an unmanned satellite that observes the earth and gathers data
- overhead-valve engine — I-head engine.
- personality inventory — a questionnaire designed to measure personality types or characteristics.
- politically motivated — If an act of violence is politically motivated, it is carried out in the interests of a particular government or political party.
- professional services — (job) A department of a supplier providing consultancy and programming manpower for the supplier's products.
- protective coloration — coloration or anything likened to it that eliminates or reduces visibility or conspicuousness.
- quality point average — grade point average.
- reverse polish syntax — postfix notation
- revillagigedo islands — an uninhabited island group belonging to Mexico, in the Pacific Ocean, SSW of the Baja California peninsula: Socorro is the largest island. 320 sq. mi. (830 sq. km).
- rio de la plata river — Rí·o de la [ree-aw th e lah] /ˈri ɔ ðɛ lɑ/ (Show IPA) an estuary on the SE coast of South America between Argentina and Uruguay, formed by the Uruguay and Paraná rivers, about 185 miles (290 km) long.
- royal victorian order — (in Britain) an order of chivalry founded by Queen Victoria in 1896, membership of which is conferred for special services to the sovereign
- sentential connective — any of several words or their equivalent symbols used in logical formulas to connect propositions, as “or,” “not,” “and,” “if and only if.”.
- sovereign wealth fund — an investment fund created using the financial assets of a national government
- surface of revolution — a surface formed by revolving a plane curve about a given line.
- television evangelist — a Christian minister who devotes time to preaching on television
- the barber of seville — Italian Il barbiere di Siviglia. a comic opera (1816) by Gioacchino Rossini based on a comedy (1775) by Beaumarchais.
- the central provinces — the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec
- to live hand to mouth — If someone lives hand to mouth or lives from hand to mouth, they have hardly enough food or money to live on.
- to take the long view — If you take the long view, you consider what is likely to happen in the future over a long period, rather than thinking only about things that are going to happen soon.
- topological invariant — a property of a topological space that is a property of every space related to the given space by a homeomorphism.
- 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.
- traveling salesperson — a representative of a business firm who travels in an assigned territory soliciting orders for a company's services.
- ultraviolet astronomy — the branch of astronomy that deals with celestial objects emitting electromagnetic radiation in the ultraviolet range.
- 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.
- vacation bible school — a religious school conducted by some churches during the summer for students on vacation.
- venus's looking glass — a purple-flowered campanulaceous plant, Legousia hybrida, of Europe, W Asia, and N Africa
- 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 association — a group of individuals joined together on the basis of mutual interest or common objectives, especially a business group that is not organized or constituted as a legal entity.
- 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
- 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.
- yellow-throated vireo — an olive-green vireo, Vireo flavifrons, of eastern North America, having a bright yellow throat and breast.
- your mileage may vary — (jargon) (YMMV) The disclaimer American car manufacturers attached to EPA mileage ratings. A humourous way of saying that the thing under discussion will not necessarily give you the same results as the author. Often used to convey the hardware dependence of Unix freeware distributions.