13-letter words containing s, a, f, e
- first refusal — If someone has first refusal on something that is being sold or offered, they have the right to decide whether or not to buy it or take it before it is offered to anyone else.
- fish geranium — zonal geranium.
- fish hatchery — a facility where fish eggs are hatched and the fry raised, especially to stock lakes, streams, and ponds.
- flabbergasted — to overcome with surprise and bewilderment; astound.
- flabbergaster — to overcome with surprise and bewilderment; astound.
- flabergasting — Present participle of flabergast.
- flamethrowers — Plural form of flamethrower.
- flash picture — a photograph made using flash photography.
- flashed glass — clear glass flashed with a thin layer of colored glass or a coating of metallic oxide.
- flatbed press — a printing machine on which the type forme is carried on a flat bed under a revolving paper-bearing cylinder
- flavoproteins — Plural form of flavoprotein.
- flemish giant — one of a breed of large domestic rabbits of Belgian origin, having a solid gray, white, or black coat, and raised for its meat and fur.
- flowering ash — a variety of ash tree that produces conspicuous flowers
- fluophosphate — fluorophosphate.
- flutterboards — Plural form of flutterboard.
- fly fisherman — one who fishes by fly-casting
- flying saucer — any of various disk-shaped objects allegedly seen flying at high speeds and altitudes, often with extreme changes in speed and direction, and thought by some to be manned by intelligent beings from outer space.
- focal seizure — an epileptic manifestation arising from a localized anomaly in the brain, as a small tumor or scar, and usually involving a single motor or sensory mechanism but occasionally spreading to other areas and causing convulsions and loss of consciousness.
- fool's errand — a completely absurd, pointless, or useless errand.
- foolhardiness — recklessly or thoughtlessly bold; foolishly rash or venturesome.
- for chrissake — for Christ's sake
- for sb's sake — When you do something for someone's sake, you do it in order to help them or make them happy.
- for values of — (jargon) A common rhetorical maneuver at MIT is to use any of the canonical random numbers as placeholders for variables. "The max function takes 42 arguments, for arbitrary values of 42". "There are 69 ways to leave your lover, for 69 = 50". This is especially likely when the speaker has uttered a random number and realises that it was not recognised as such, but even "non-random" numbers are occasionally used in this fashion. A related joke is that pi equals 3 - for small values of pi and large values of 3. This usage probably derives from the programming language MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder), an ALGOL-like language that was the most common choice among mainstream (non-hacker) users at MIT in the mid-1960s. It had a control structure FOR VALUES OF X = 3, 7, 99 DO ... that would repeat the indicated instructions for each value in the list (unlike the usual FOR that generates an arithmetic sequence of values). MAD is long extinct, but similar for-constructs still flourish (e.g. in Unix's shell languages).
- for-instances — an instance or example: Give me a for-instance of what you mean.
- force a smile — to make oneself smile
- forearm smash — a blow like a punch delivered with the forearm in certain types of wrestling
- foreshadowing — to show or indicate beforehand; prefigure: Political upheavals foreshadowed war.
- forest ranger — any of the officers employed by the government to supervise the care and preservation of forests, especially public forests.
- formal system — an uninterpreted symbolic system whose syntax is precisely defined, and on which a relation of deducibility is defined in purely syntactic terms; a logistic system
- fort sheridan — a military reservation in NE Illinois, on W shore of Lake Michigan S of Lake Forest.
- fortunateness — The quality of being fortunate; fortune; luck.
- fosamprenavir — (pharmaceutical drug) An anti-retroviral prodrug of the protease inhibitor amprenavir. It is used to treat HIV infected patients.
- foster father — a man who takes the place of a father in raising a child.
- foster parent — a foster father or foster mother.
- fountainheads — Plural form of fountainhead.
- fourth estate — the journalistic profession or its members; the press.
- fowler's toad — an eastern U.S. toad, Bufo woodhousii fowleri, having an almost patternless white belly.
- fractionalise — Alt form fractionalize.
- fractiousness — refractory or unruly: a fractious animal that would not submit to the harness.
- franchisement — a privilege of a public nature conferred on an individual, group, or company by a government: a franchise to operate a bus system.
- franz josef i — English name Francis Joseph I. 1830–1916, emperor of Austria (1848–1916) and king of Hungary (1867–1916)
- fraser island — an island off the south-east coast of Queensland and the largest sand island in the world; contains rainforests, heathlands, and freshwater lakes; a national park (since 1976) and a World Heritage site (since 1992). Area: 1840 sq km (710 sq miles). Pop: 194 (2011)
- free and easy — enjoying personal rights or liberty, as a person who is not in slavery: a land of free people.
- free software — (software) Software that everyone is free to copy, redistribute and modify. That implies free software must be available as source code, hence "free open source software" - "FOSS". It is usually also free of charge, though anyone can sell free software so long as they don't impose any new restrictions on its redistribution or use. The widespread acceptance of this definition and free software itself owes a great deal to Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. There are many other kinds of "free software" in the sense of "free of charge". See "-ware".
- free-and-easy — enjoying personal rights or liberty, as a person who is not in slavery: a land of free people.
- free-standing — A free-standing piece of furniture or other object is not fixed to anything, or stands on its own away from other things.
- french pastry — fine, rich, or fancy dessert pastry, especially made from puff paste and filled with cream or fruit preparations.
- freshman week — a week at the beginning of the school year with a program planned to orient entering students, especially at a college.
- freudian slip — (in Freudian psychology) an inadvertent mistake in speech or writing that is thought to reveal a person's unconscious motives, wishes, or attitudes.
- frisches haff — a lagoon in N Poland. 52 miles (84 km) long; 4–12 miles (6–19 km) wide.