20-letter words containing s, e, r, i
- fore-and-aft topsail — gaff topsail (def 1).
- formative assessment — ongoing assessment of a pupil's educational development within a particular subject area
- four-colour glossies — 1. Literature created by marketroids that allegedly contains technical specs but which is in fact as superficial as possible without being totally content-free. "Forget the four-colour glossies, give me the tech ref manuals." Often applied as an indication of superficiality even when the material is printed on ordinary paper in black and white. Four-colour-glossy manuals are *never* useful for finding a problem. 2. [rare] Applied by extension to manual pages that don't contain enough information to diagnose why the program doesn't produce the expected or desired output.
- frederick barbarossa — ("Frederick Barbarossa") 1123?–90, king of Germany 1152–90; king of Italy 1152–90: emperor of the Holy Roman Empire 1152–90.
- freight pass-through — a special allowance or discounted price given a bookseller or bookstore by a publishing house for paying the freight charge on a shipment of books ordered: so called because the shipping charge is passed on to the consumer by an increase in the suggested retail price for each book. Abbreviation: FPT.
- fridtjof nansen land — Franz Josef Land.
- friend with benefits — (used as a euphemism) a friend with whom one has sex without a romantic relationship or commitment.
- friends of the earth — an organization of environmentalists and conservationists whose aim is to promote the sustainable use of the earth's resources
- frosting on the cake — a sweet mixture, cooked or uncooked, for coating or filling cakes, cookies, and the like; icing.
- garcilaso de la vega — 1503?–36, Spanish poet.
- gastroduodenostomies — Plural form of gastroduodenostomy.
- general postal union — former name of Universal Postal Union. Abbreviation: GPU.
- general public virus — (software, legal) A pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or application programs incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same terms as GNU code. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft "infects" software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code.
- generative semantics — a theory of generative grammar holding that the deep structure of a sentence is equivalent to its semantic representation, from which the surface structure can then be derived using only one set of rules that relate underlying meaning and surface form rather than separate sets of semantic and syntactic rules.
- get one's finger out — to begin or speed up activity, esp after initial delay or slackness
- get someone in wrong — to bring someone into disfavor
- get under one's skin — the external covering or integument of an animal body, especially when soft and flexible.
- get/give so the bird — If an audience gives someone the bird, they shout loudly in order to show their disappointment or disapproval.
- gingival hyperplasia — Gingival hyperplasia is abnormal enlargement of the gums.
- give one's right arm — to be prepared to make any sacrifice
- give someone the air — a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and minute amounts of other gases that surrounds the earth and forms its atmosphere.
- go against the grain — If you say that an idea or action goes against the grain, you mean that it is very difficult for you to accept it or do it, because it conflicts with your previous ideas, beliefs, or principles.
- go like the clappers — to move extremely fast
- good driver discount — A good driver discount is a discount on insurance that is available to drivers who have no at-fault accidents and no traffic offenses during a particular period.
- 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.
- gravimetric analysis — analysis by weight.
- great-circle sailing — sailing between two points more or less according to an arc of a great circle, in practice almost always using a series of rhumb lines of different bearings to approximate the arc, whose own bearing changes constantly unless it coincides with a meridian or the equator.
- greek-letter society — any student fraternity or sorority in a US university or college, usually using Greek letters in their title
- green light district — an area in which prostitution is officially tolerated
- green monkey disease — Marburg disease.
- green mountain state — Vermont (used as a nickname).
- gregory of nazianzus — Saint. ?329–89 ad, Cappadocian theologian: bishop of Caesarea (370–79). Feast days: Jan 2, 25, and 30
- grievous bodily harm — law: serious injury
- grolier de servieres — Jean [zhahn] /ʒɑ̃/ (Show IPA), 1479–1565, French bibliophile.
- group life insurance — a form of life insurance available to members of a group, typically employees of a company, under a master policy.
- group representation — representation in a governing body on the basis of interests rather than by geographical location.
- 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.
- hardware handshaking — (communications) A technique for regulating the flow of data across an interface by means of signals carried on separate wires. A common example is the RTS (Request to Send) and CTS (Clear to Send) signals on an EIA-232 serial line. The alternative, software handshaking, uses two special characters inserted into the data stream to carry the same information.
- harmonic minor scale — minor scale (def 1).
- harmonic progression — a series of numbers the reciprocals of which are in arithmetic progression.
- hawaii-standard-time — Alaska-Hawaii time.
- health questionnaire — A health questionnaire is a list of questions about someone's health issued by underwriters before accepting a person as a risk.
- heston and isleworth — a former borough, now part of Hounslow, in SE England, near London.
- heteropolysaccharide — (carbohydrate) any polysaccharide formed from two or more different kinds of monosaccharide.
- highbush huckleberry — black huckleberry.
- 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.
- holder in due course — a person who has received a negotiable instrument in good faith and without notice that it is overdue, that there is any prior claim, or that there is a defect in the title of the person who negotiated it.
- holy water sprinkler — morning star (def 2).
- horizontal scan rate — (hardware) (HSR) The measure of how many scan lines of pixels a monitor can display in one second, expressed in kHz (generally somewhere between 20 and 100 kHz). The HSR is controlled by the horizontal sync signal generated by the video controller, but is limited by the speed with which the monitor can scan the electron beam horizontally across the screen and then return it to the beginning of the next line.