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22-letter words containing s, i, d, e, t, r

  • digital versatile disc — (storage)   (DVD, formerly "Digital Video Disc") An optical storage medium with improved capacity and bandwidth compared with the Compact Disc. DVD, like CD, was initally marketed for entertainment and later for computer users. [When was it first available?] A DVD can hold a full-length film with up to 133 minutes of high quality video, in MPEG-2 format, and audio. The first DVD drives for computers were read-only drives ("DVD-ROM"). These can store 4.7 GBytes - over seven times the storage capacity of CD-ROM. DVD-ROM drives read existing CD-ROMs and music CDs and are compatible with installed sound and video boards. Additionally, the DVD-ROM drive can read DVD films and modern computers can decode them in software in real-time. The DVD video standard was announced in November 1995. Matshusita did much of the early development but Philips made the first DVD player, which appeared in Japan in November 1996. In May 2004, Sony released the first dual-layer drive, which increased the disc capacity to 8.5 GB. Double-sided, dual-layer discs will eventually increase the capacity to 17 GB. Write-once DVD-R ("recordable") drives record a 3.9GB DVD-R disc that can be read on a DVD-ROM drive. Pioneer released the first DVD-R drive on 1997-09-29. By March 1997, Hitachi had released a rewritable DVD-RAM drive (by false analogy with random-access memory). DVD-RAM drives read and write to a 2.6 GB DVD-RAM disc, read and write-once to a 3.9GB DVD-R disc, and read a 4.7 GB or 8.5 GB DVD-ROM. Later, DVD-RAM discs could be read on DVD-R and DVD-ROM drives.
  • director of admissions — a member of a university staff who is in overall charge of admissions to the university and its courses
  • directory system agent — (DSA) The software that provides the X.500 Directory Service for a portion of the directory information base. Generally, each DSA is responsible for the directory information for a single organisation or organisational unit.
  • disciplinary committee — a committee charged with examining alleged breaches of discipline within an organization, profession, etc and adjudicating on them
  • disposable soma theory — the theory that ageing is caused by the body having increasingly fewer resources to allocate towards repairing wear and damage to tissues
  • distributed generation — A distributed generation system involves a person or company generating some of their power requirements in different ways, such as locally, or using renewable energy, in order to avoid taking it all from the grid.
  • distributed processing — a system consisting of a network of microcomputers performing certain functions and linked with a main computer used for more complex tasks
  • distributive education — a special program of vocational education at the high-school level in which a student is employed part-time, receiving on-the-job training, and also attends classes, most of which pertain directly to the student's vocational field.
  • dog's dinner/breakfast — You describe something as a dog's breakfast or dog's dinner in order to express your disapproval of it, for example because it is very untidy, badly organized, or badly done.
  • dominant seventh chord — a chord consisting of the dominant and the major third, perfect fifth, and minor seventh above it. Its most natural resolution is to a chord on the tonic
  • don't misunderstand me — You can say don't misunderstand me when you want to correct a wrong impression that you think someone may have got about what you are saying.
  • dread high bit disease — (character)   A condition endemic to PRIME (also known as "PR1ME") minicomputers that results in all the characters having their high bit (0x80, see meta bit) ON rather than OFF. This complicates transporting files to other systems and talking to true 8-bit devices. Folklore had it that PRIME adopted the convention in order to save 25 cents per serial line per machine; PRIME old-timers, on the other hand, claim they inherited the disease from Honeywell via customer NASA's compatibility requirements and struggled heroically to cure it. Whoever was responsible, this probably qualifies as one of the most cretinous design tradeoffs ever made. A few other machines have exhibited similar brain damage.
  • earth inductor compass — a compass actuated by induction from the earth's magnetic field.
  • enchanter's nightshade — any of several onagraceous plants of the genus Circaea, esp C. lutetiana, having small white flowers and bristly fruits
  • end transmission block — (character)   (ETB) The mnemonic for ASCII character 23.
  • engineering industries — the industries creating engineering products
  • entertainment industry — show business
  • equal rights amendment — a proposed amendment to the US Constitution enshrining equality between the sexes
  • federal district court — district court (def 2).
  • fermi-dirac statistics — the branch of quantum statistics used to calculate the permitted energy arrangements of the particles in a system in terms of the exclusion principle
  • fixed investment trust — unit trust (def 1).
  • frequency distribution — the correspondence of a set of frequencies with the set of categories, intervals, or values into which a population is classified.
  • fringed with something — having a specified thing around the edge
  • geographic determinism — a doctrine that regards geographical conditions as the determining or molding agency of group life.
  • geometric distribution — the distribution of the number, x, of independent trials required to obtain a first success: where the probability in each is p, the probability that x = r is p(1-p)r–1, where r = 1, 2, 3, …, with mean 1/p
  • get a word in edgeways — to succeed in interrupting a conversation in which someone else is talking incessantly
  • get a word in edgewise — with the edge forward; in the direction of the edge.
  • governor winthrop desk — an 18th-century American desk having a slant front.
  • gravitational redshift — (in general relativity) the shift toward longer wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation emitted by a source in a gravitational field, especially at the surface of a massive star.
  • green around the gills — the respiratory organ of aquatic animals, as fish, that breathe oxygen dissolved in water.
  • gross domestic product — gross national product excluding payments on foreign investments. Abbreviation: GDP.
  • hammersmith and fulham — a borough of Greater London on the River Thames: established in 1965 by the amalgamation of Fulham and Hammersmith. Pop: 174 200 (2003 est). Area: 16 sq km (6 sq miles)
  • hans christian oersted — Hans Christian [hahns kris-tyahn] /hɑns ˈkrɪs tyɑn/ (Show IPA), 1777–1851, Danish physicist.
  • hawaiian standard time — the time used in the Hawaiian time zone
  • hold the purse strings — hold the purse strings, to have the power to determine how money shall be spent.
  • horn-rimmed spectacles — spectacles with rims made of material resembling horn
  • hybrid multiprocessing — (parallel)   (HMP) The kind of multitasking which OS/2 supports. HMP provides some elements of symmetric multiprocessing, using add-on IBM software called MP/2. OS/2 SMP was planned for release in late 1993.
  • in one's birthday suit — naked; nude
  • in your wildest dreams — If you say that you could not imagine a particular thing in your wildest dreams, you are emphasizing that you think it is extremely strange or unlikely.
  • in/of the order of sth — You use in the order of or of the order of when mentioning an approximate figure.
  • independent assortment — law of independent assortment.
  • indeterminate sentence — a penalty, imposed by a court, that has relatively wide limits or no limits, as one of imprisonment for one to ten years.
  • industrial archaeology — the study of past industrial machines, works, etc
  • industrial engineering — engineering applied to the planning, design, and control of industrial operations.
  • industrialized country — a country characterized by industry on an extensive scale
  • instruction scheduling — The compiler phase that orders instructions on a pipelined, superscalar, or VLIW architecture so as to maximise the number of function units operating in parallel and to minimise the time they spend waiting for each other. Examples are filling a delay slot; interspersing floating-point instructions with integer instructions to keep both units operating; making adjacent instructions independent, e.g. one which writes a register and another which reads from it; separating memory writes to avoid filling the write buffer. Norman P. Jouppi and David W. Wall, "Available Instruction-Level Parallelism for Superscalar and Superpipelined Processors", Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pp. 272--282, 1989.
  • international standard — (standard)   The series of standards from ISO and its subcommitees.
  • interoperable database — A database front-end which communicates with multiple heterogenous databases and makes them appear as a single homogenous entity with semantic calls. See ODBC.
  • investigative new drug — a regulatory classification assigned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to an unproven drug, allowing its use in approved studies with human patients. Abbreviation: IND.
  • klinefelter's syndrome — an abnormal condition in which at least one extra X chromosome is present in a male: characterized by reduced or absent sperm production, small testicles, and in some cases enlarged breasts.
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