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20-letter words containing r, e, t, o, s, u

  • refuse disposal unit — a unit or part of a sink that disposes of waste food, etc, by grinding
  • 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.
  • request for proposal — (programming)   (RFP) The publication by a prospective software purchaser of details of the required system in order to attract offers by software developers to supply it. Software development under contract starts with the selection of the software developer by the customer. A request for proposal (also called in Britain an "invitation to tender") is the beginning of the selection process.
  • respiratory quotient — the ratio of the amount of carbon dioxide released by the lungs to the amount of oxygen taken in during a given period.
  • return on investment — the amount of profit, before tax and after depreciation, from an investment made, usually expressed as a percentage of the original total cost invested. Abbreviation: ROI.
  • return on net assets — the amount of profit computed by dividing net income before interest and taxes by the cost of net assets, usually expressed as a percentage. Abbreviation: RONA.
  • reversionary annuity — an annuity payable to a beneficiary during the period of time he or she survives the insured.
  • rheumatoid arthritis — a chronic autoimmune disease characterized by inflammation of the joints, frequently accompanied by marked deformities, and ordinarily associated with manifestations of a general, or systemic, affliction.
  • rocky mountain sheep — bighorn.
  • roller-blind shutter — curtain shutter.
  • rotations per minute — revolutions per minute
  • rub sb's nose in sth — To rub someone's nose in something that they do not want to think about, such as a failing or a mistake they have made, means to remind them repeatedly about it.
  • santa cruz operation — (SCO) A supplier of Unix systems for Intel microprocessors. They supply Xenix and Open Desktop. Founded in 1979, SCO became a public company in May, 1993 and trades on the Nasdaq National Market System under the symbol SCOC. SCO maintains its world headquarters in Santa Cruz, California, USA; a European headquarters in Watford, England; a Government Systems Group in Reston, Virginia; and offices in Asia, Australia, Canada, Latin America, and throughout Europe and the United States. In February 1993, SCO acquired IXI Limited of Cambridge, England, the leading supplier of Unix System windowing software.
  • scatter site housing — public housing, especially for low-income families, built throughout an urban area rather than being concentrated in a single neighborhood.
  • schrodinger equation — the wave equation of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. Also called Schrödinger wave equation. Compare wave equation (def 2).
  • secure accommodation — an institution where young offenders are kept in custody
  • secure sockets layer — (networking, security)   (SSL) A protocol designed by Netscape Communications Corporation to provide secure communications over the Internet using asymmetric key encryption. SSL is layered beneath application protocols such as HTTP, SMTP, Telnet, FTP, Gopher and NNTP and is layered above the connection protocol TCP/IP. It is used by the HTTPS access method.
  • security association — (networking)   The relationship between two or more entities (typically, a computer, but could be a user on a computer, or software component) which describes how the entities will use security services, such as encryption, to communicate. See RFC 1825.
  • semiautobiographical — pertaining to or being a fictionalized account of an author's own life.
  • shareholders' equity — Shareholders' equity is the total amount of ownership investment in a company.
  • shoulder to shoulder — the part of each side of the body in humans, at the top of the trunk, extending from each side of the base of the neck to the region where the arm articulates with the trunk.
  • shoulder-length hair — hair that reaches a person's shoulders
  • slip through the net — If criminals slip through the net, they avoid being caught by the system or trap that was meant to catch them.
  • social security card — a card that contains details of a person's social security number
  • sodium fluoroacetate — a white, amorphous, water-soluble, poisonous powder, C 2 H 2 FO 2 Na, used as a rodenticide.
  • sodium meta-arsenite — sodium arsenite.
  • soke of peterborough — a former administrative unit of E central England, generally considered part of Northamptonshire or Huntingdonshire: absorbed into Cambridgeshire in 1974
  • sound motion picture — a motion picture with a soundtrack.
  • south american plate — a major tectonic division of the earth's crust, comprising the continent of South America and several ocean basins and bounded on the north by the Caribbean Plate, on the east by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, on the west by a submarine trench that borders the western coast of the continent, and on the south by the Antarctic Plate.
  • south orkney islands — an uninhabited group of islands in the S Atlantic, southeast of Cape Horn: formerly a dependency of the Falkland Islands; part of the British Antarctic Territory since 1962 (claims are suspended under the Antarctic Treaty). Area: 621 sq km (240 sq miles)
  • south temperate zone — the part of the earth's surface between the tropic of Capricorn and the Antarctic Circle.
  • southern oscillation — a low-latitude fluctuation of atmospheric pressure closely linked with El Niño events, specifically the periods of El Niño warming and La Niña cooling.
  • special patrol group — a former police unit tasked with counter terrorism in the Royal Ulster Constabulary
  • spontaneous abortion — miscarriage (def 1).
  • spontaneous recovery — the reappearance of a response after its extinction has been followed by a period of rest
  • spontaneous-abortion — Also called voluntary abortion. the removal of an embryo or fetus from the uterus in order to end a pregnancy.
  • square cross-section — If a kelly has a square cross-section, it has a surface area with four equal sides, when looked at as if has been sliced through.
  • square of opposition — a diagrammatic representation of the opposition of categorical propositions.
  • squatter sovereignty — (used contemptuously by its opponents) popular sovereignty (def 2).
  • squirrel's-foot fern — ball fern.
  • standard book number — International Standard Book Number. Abbreviation: SBN.
  • state enrolled nurse — a nurse with training and examinations enabling him or her to perform many nursing services
  • states of the church — Papal States
  • stockholders' equity — the net assets of a corporation as owned by stockholders in capital stock, capital surplus, and undistributed earnings.
  • 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
  • structural isomerism — Chemistry. the relation of two or more compounds, radicals, or ions that are composed of the same kinds and numbers of atoms but differ from each other in structural arrangement (structural isomerism) as CH 3 OCH 3 and CH 3 CH 2 OH, or in the arrangement of their atoms in space and therefore in one or more properties. Compare optical isomerism, stereoisomerism.
  • subscription edition — an edition of one or more volumes for which a number of prospective purchasers place orders, usually in advance of publication.
  • superior conjunction — the alignment of an inferior planet and the sun in which the planet is at the far side of the sun from the earth.
  • supersonic transport — a commercial jet airplane that can fly faster than the speed of sound. Abbreviation: SST.
  • surveillance society — a society where surveillance technology is widely used to monitor people's everyday activities
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