13-letter words containing s, a, f, r, o
- east hartford — a town in central Connecticut.
- factorisation — Alternative spelling of factorization.
- factory-fresh — coming directly from the factory; brand new
- fairy swallow — a variety of domestic fancy pigeon having blue-and-white plumage and heavily muffed feet
- false colours — a flag to which one is not entitled, flown esp in order to deceive
- false horizon — a line or plane that simulates the horizon, used in altitude-measuring devices or the like.
- false saffron — a red dye used for cotton and for colouring foods and cosmetics, or a drug obtained from the florets of this plant
- fantasmagoria — phantasmagoria.
- fantasmagoric — phantasmagoria.
- faroe islands — islands in Atlantic Ocean
- fashionmonger — (derogatory) One who slavishly follows the latest fashions.
- fast follower — a company that is quick to pick up good new ideas from other companies
- fat electrons — (electronics, humour) Old-time hacker David Cargill's theory on the cause of computer glitches. Your typical electricity company draws its line current out of the big generators with a pair of coil taps located near the top of the dynamo. When the normal tap brushes get dirty, they take them off line to clean them up, and use special auxiliary taps on the *bottom* of the coil. Now, this is a problem, because when they do that they get not ordinary or "thin" electrons, but the fat sloppy electrons that are heavier and so settle to the bottom of the generator. These flow down ordinary wires just fine, but when they have to turn a sharp corner (as in an integrated-circuit via), they're apt to get stuck. This is what causes computer glitches. Compare bogon, magic smoke.
- favorableness — Alternative spelling of favourableness.
- feature shock — (jargon) (From Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock") A user's confusion when confronted with a package that has too many features and poor introductory material.
- feature story — a newspaper or magazine article or report of a person, event, an aspect of a major event, or the like, often having a personal slant and written in an individual style. Compare follow-up (def 3b), hard news, news story.
- fermentations — Plural form of fermentation.
- fertilisation — (chiefly, British) alternative spelling of 'fertilization'.
- festivalgoers — Plural form of festivalgoer.
- fibromuscular — (anatomy) Of or pertaining to both fibrous and muscular tissue.
- fibrovascular — composed of fibrous and conductive tissue, as in the vascular systems of higher plants: a fibrovascular bundle.
- field sparrow — a common North American finch, Spizella pusilla, found in brushy pasturelands.
- filmographies — Plural form of filmography.
- flamethrowers — Plural form of flamethrower.
- flaming sword — a cultivated bromeliad, Vriesea splendens, native to French Guiana, having long, red bracts and yellow flowers.
- flash-forward — a device in the narrative of a motion picture, novel, etc., by which a future event or scene is inserted into the chronological structure of the work.
- flavoproteins — Plural form of flavoprotein.
- flirtatiously — given or inclined to flirtation.
- floating ribs — the eleventh and twelfth pairs of ribs, not attached to the breastbone or to other ribs but only to the vertebrae
- florianopolis — a state in S Brazil. 36,856 sq. mi. (95,455 sq. km). Capital: Florianópolis.
- floristically — In a floristic manner.
- flowering ash — a variety of ash tree that produces conspicuous flowers
- fluorocarbons — Plural form of fluorocarbon.
- fluoroplastic — any of the plastics, as Teflon, in which hydrogen atoms of the hydrocarbon chains are replaced by fluorine atoms.
- flutterboards — Plural form of flutterboard.
- 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 part — When you are describing people's thoughts or actions, you can say for her part or for my part, for example, to introduce what a particular person thinks or does.
- 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
- formalisation — Alternative spelling of formalization.
- formularising — Present participle of formularise.