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18-letter words containing r, u, n, i, g

  • coupling capacitor — A coupling capacitor is a capacitor that is used to transmit an alternating current signal from one node to another.
  • creeping featurism — (jargon)   /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ (Or "feature creep") A systematic tendency to load more chrome and features onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed. "The main problem with BSD Unix has always been creeping featurism." More generally, creeping featurism is the tendency for anything to become more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had this feature too". The result is usually a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone, and then another, and another, .... When creeping featurism gets out of hand, it's like a cancer. Usually this term is used to describe computer programs, but it could also be said of the federal government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A similar phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious redesigns; see second-system effect. See also creeping elegance.
  • cumulative scoring — a method of scoring in which the score of a partnership is taken as the sum of their scores on all hands played.
  • cunninghame graham — R(obert) B(ontine). 1852–1936, Scottish traveller, writer, and politician, noted for his essays and short stories: first president (1928) of the Scottish Nationalist Party
  • cushing's syndrome — a medical condition characterized by obesity, hypertension, excessive hair growth, etc., caused by an overactive adrenal gland or large doses of corticosteroids
  • debt restructuring — Debt restructuring is a method of organizing a company's debts in a different way in order to make the company more likely to be able to pay them.
  • developing country — a nonindustrialized poor country that is seeking to develop its resources by industrialization
  • digital signatures — digital signature
  • dramatic monologue — a poetic form in which a single character, addressing a silent auditor at a critical moment, reveals himself or herself and the dramatic situation.
  • driving instructor — sb who teaches people to drive
  • drug-eluting stent — A drug-eluting stent is a tube placed into a blocked artery that slowly releases a drug to prevent another blockage in the artery.
  • duty-free shopping — the making of duty-free purchases
  • dwarf storage unit — (humour)   (DSU) An IBM term for a cupboard.
  • eastern algonquian — a subgroup of the Algonquian language family, comprising the languages spoken aboriginally from Nova Scotia to northeastern North Carolina.
  • eighty-twenty rule — (programming)   The program-design version of the law of diminishing returns. The 80/20 rule says that roughly 80% of the problem can be solved with 20% of the effort that it would take to solve the whole problem. For example, parsing e-mail addresses in "From:" lines in e-mail messages is notoriously difficult if you follow the RFC 2822 specification. However, about 60% of actual "From:" lines are in the format "From: Their Name <[email protected]>", with a far more constrained idea of what can be in "user" or "host" than in RFC 2822. Another 25% just add double-quotes around "Their Name". Matching just those two patterns would thus cover 85% of "From:" lines, with a tiny portion of the code required to fully implement RFC2822. (Adding support for "From: [email protected]" and "From: [email protected] (Their Name) " brings coverage to almost 100%, leaving only really baroque things that RFC-2822 permits, like "From: Pete(A wonderful \) chap)
  • emergent evolution — the doctrine that, in the course of evolution, some entirely new properties, such as life and consciousness, appear at certain critical points, usually because of an unpredictable rearrangement of the already existing entities
  • energy consumption — amount of energy used
  • equinoctial spring — either of the two highest spring tides that occur at the equinoxes
  • evolution strategy — (ES) A kind of evolutionary algorithm where individuals (potential solutions) are encoded by a set of real-valued "object variables" (the individual's "genome"). For each object variable an individual also has a "strategy variable" which determines the degree of mutation to be applied to the corresponding object variable. The strategy variables also mutate, allowing the rate of mutation of the object variables to vary. An ES is characterised by the population size, the number of offspring produced in each generation and whether the new population is selected from parents and offspring or only from the offspring. ES were invented in 1963 by Ingo Rechenberg, Hans-Paul Schwefel at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) while searching for the optimal shapes of bodies in a flow.
  • feeping creaturism — /fee'ping kree"ch*r-izm/ A deliberate spoonerism for creeping featurism, meant to imply that the system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of hacks. This term isn"t really well defined, but it sounds so neat that most hackers have said or heard it. It is probably reinforced by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their customary noises.
  • fibrocartilaginous — a type of cartilage having a large number of fibers.
  • floating underflow — underflow
  • foundation garment — an undergarment, as a girdle or corset, worn by women to support or give shape to the contours of the body.
  • four-legged friend — a four-legged animal, esp a dog
  • fulminating powder — powder that explodes by percussion.
  • fuming nitric acid — a colorless, yellowish, or brownish fuming corrosive liquid, usually prepared from nitric acid by the addition of excess nitrogen dioxide: used in organic synthesis for nitration, and as an oxidizer in liquid propellants for rockets.
  • functional program — (language)   A program employing the functional programming approach or written in a functional language.
  • funding operations — the conversion of government floating stock or short-term debt into holdings of long-term bonds
  • furnishing fabrics — fabrics used to make and cover furniture
  • gabriele dannunzio — Gabriele [Italian gah-bree-e-le] /Italian ˌgɑ briˈɛ lɛ/ (Show IPA), (Duca Minimo) 1863–1938, Italian soldier, novelist, and poet.
  • gamma distribution — a continuous two-parameter distribution from which the chi-square and exponential distributions are derived, written Gamma (α. β), where α and β are greater than zero, and defined in terms of the gamma function
  • geodetic surveying — the surveying of the earth's surface, making allowance for its curvature and giving an accurate framework for smaller-scale surveys
  • get one's irish up — of, relating to, or characteristic of Ireland, its inhabitants, or their language.
  • give someone curry — to assault (a person) verbally or physically
  • glomerulonephritis — a kidney disease affecting the capillaries of the glomeruli, characterized by albuminuria, edema, and hypertension.
  • gnu superoptimiser — (GSO) A function sequence generator that uses an exhaustive generate-and-test approach to find the shortest instruction sequence for a given function. Written by Torbjorn Granlund <[email protected]> and Tom Wood. You have to tell the superoptimiser which function and which CPU you want to get code for. This is useful for compiler writers. FTP superopt-2.2.tar.Z from a GNU archive site. Generates code for DEC Alpha, SPARC, Intel 80386, 88000, RS/6000, 68000, 29000 and Pyramid (SP, AP and XP).
  • going to jerusalem — musical chairs.
  • golden opportunity — perfect chance
  • government housing — housing owned and managed by the federal or state government, which is rented out to tenants, esp as a form of affordable housing
  • governor's council — a council chosen to assist or inform a governor on legislative or executive matters.
  • graduated cylinder — a narrow, cylindrical container marked with horizontal lines to represent units of measurement and used to precisely measure the volume of liquids.
  • grampian mountains — a mountain system of central Scotland, extending from the southwest to the northeast and separating the Highlands from the Lowlands. Highest peak: Ben Nevis, 1344 m (4408 ft)
  • grand council fire — a formal gathering of camp fire members requiring a minimum attendance of three troops.
  • granulation tissue — tissue formed in ulcers and in early wound healing and repair, composed largely of newly growing capillaries and so called from its irregular surface in open wounds; proud flesh.
  • gravitational pull — force of gravity
  • greenhouse warming — the increase in the mean temperature of the earth attributed to the greenhouse effect
  • grumbling appendix — a condition in which the appendix causes intermittent pain but appendicitis has not developed
  • guidance counselor — advisor in schools
  • gulf of california — an arm of the Pacific Ocean, between Sonora and Lower California
  • hash house slinger — a person who serves in a cheap cafe
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