20-letter words containing p, a, c, t
- factor of production — any instrument, agent, etc., employed in the production of goods and services.
- father of the chapel — (in British trade unions in the publishing and printing industries) a shop steward
- feather in one's cap — one of the horny structures forming the principal covering of birds, consisting typically of a hard, tubular portion attached to the body and tapering into a thinner, stemlike portion bearing a series of slender, barbed processes that interlock to form a flat structure on each side.
- file descriptor leak — (programming) (Or "fd leak" /F D leek/) A kind of programming bug analogous to a core leak, in which a program fails to close file descriptors ("fd"s) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually runs out of them. See leak.
- fixed action pattern — a highly stereotyped pattern of behavior that is characteristic of a particular species.
- fixed-price contract — a contract in which the price is preset and invariable, regardless of the actual costs of production.
- flat-plate collector — a type of solar collector consisting of a series of flat glass or plastic plates with black metal surfaces that absorb solar energy.
- freefall parachuting — a variety of parachuting in which the jumper manoeuvres in free fall before opening the parachute
- frontenac et palluau — Comte de (Louis de Buade) 1620?–98, French governor of New France 1672–82, 1689–98.
- 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 particle — elementary particle.
- gaff-topsail catfish — a sea catfish, Bagre marinus, occurring in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico from Cape Cod to Panama, and having the spine of the dorsal fin greatly prolonged and flattened.
- general practitioner — a medical practitioner whose practice is not limited to any specific branch of medicine or class of diseases. Abbreviation: G.P.
- get a real computer! — (jargon) A typical hacker response to news that somebody is having trouble getting work done on a toy system or bitty box. The threshold for "real computer" rises with time. As of mid-1993 it meant multi-tasking, with a hard disk, and an address space bigger than 16 megabytes. At this time, according to GLS, computers with character-only displays were verging on "unreal". In 2001, a real computer has a one gigahertz processor, 128 MB of RAM, 20 GB of hard disk, and runs Linux.
- get one's hackles up — to become tense with anger; bristle
- glucosamine sulphate — a compound used in some herbal remedies and dietary supplements, esp to strengthen joint cartilage
- go like the clappers — to move extremely fast
- gorno-altai republic — a constituent republic of S Russia: mountainous, rising over 4350 m (14 500 ft) in the Altai Mountains of the south. Capital: Gorno-Altaisk. Pop: 202 900 (2002). Area: 92 600 sq km (35 740 sq miles)
- graphics accelerator — (graphics, hardware) Hardware (often an extra circuit board) to perform tasks such as plotting lines and surfaces in two or three dimensions, filling, shading and hidden line removal.
- hampton court palace — a royal palace in Hampton, London, built in 1515 by Cardinal Wolsey
- hard gelatin capsule — A hard gelatin capsule is a type of capsule that is usually used to contain medicine in the form of dry powder or very small pellets.
- have an itching palm — to desire money greedily
- helicopter parenting — a style of child rearing in which an overprotective mother or father discourages a child's independence by being too involved in the child's life: In typical helicopter parenting, a mother or father swoops in at any sign of challenge or discomfort.
- heteropolysaccharide — (carbohydrate) any polysaccharide formed from two or more different kinds of monosaccharide.
- high-energy particle — Physics
- hipparchus satellite — an astronometric satellite launched in 1989 by the European Space Agency that measured the position, proper motion, and brightness of 118 218 stars down to 12th magnitude and the magnitude and colour of a million stars down to 10th magnitude
- hire-purchase system — a system of payment for a commodity in regular installments while using it.
- hit the panic button — an alarm button for use in an emergency, as to summon help.
- human genome project — a federally funded U.S. scientific project to identify both the genes and the entire sequence of DNA base pairs that make up the human genome.
- hydrostatic pressure — Hydrostatic pressure is the pressure exerted by a liquid that depends on how deep it is.
- hyperadrenocorticism — Cushing's syndrome.
- hyperbolic cotangent — a hyperbolic function that is the ratio of cosh to sinh, being the reciprocal of tanh; coth
- hypercholesterolemia — the presence of an excessive amount of cholesterol in the blood.
- hyperhomocysteinemia — (medicine) The presence of an excessive amount of homocysteine in the blood.
- implicit parallelism — (parallel) A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which decides automatically which parts to run in parallel. The best way of providing implicit parallelism is still (1995) an active research topic. The problem is to generate the right number of parallel tasks of the right size (or "granularity"). Too many tasks and the system gets bogged down in house-keeping, or memory for waiting tasks runs out, too few tasks and processors are left idle. The best performance is usually achieved with explicit parallelism where the programmer can annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks.
- imported currantworm — the larva of any of several insects, as a sawfly, Nematus ribesii (imported currantworm) which infests and feeds on the leaves and fruit of currants.
- in the public domain — able to be discussed and examined freely by the general public
- income tax inspector — a person whose job is to assess individuals' income tax liability
- incomplete dominance — the appearance in a heterozygote of a trait that is intermediate between either of the trait's homozygous phenotypes.
- incorporated company — a legally constituted company
- independence of path — the property of a function for which the line integral has the same value along all curves between two specified points.
- indicated horsepower — the horsepower of a reciprocating engine as shown by an indicator record. Abbreviation: ihp, IHP.
- infectious hepatitis — hepatitis A.
- insulin-coma therapy — a former treatment for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, employing insulin-induced hypoglycemia as a method for producing convulsive seizures.
- interference pattern — a series of alternating dark and bright bands produced as a result of light interference.
- interplanetary space — the region of space occurring around the sun and planets of the solar system. The density is normally negligible although cosmic rays, meteorites, gas clouds, etc, can occur
- james prescott joule — James Prescott, 1818–89, English physicist.
- juno and the paycock — a play (1924) by Sean O'Casey.
- 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.