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20-letter words containing s, i, f, t

  • cut of someone's jib — someone's manner, behaviour, style, etc
  • de facto segregation — racial, ethnic, or other segregation resulting from societal differences between groups, as socioeconomic or political disparity, without institutionalized legislation intended to segregate.
  • definite description — a description that is modified by the definite article or a possessive, such as the woman in white or Rosemary's baby
  • difference threshold — the minimum difference between two stimuli that is just detectable by a person
  • differential housing — the casing that houses the differential of a motor vehicle
  • discounted cash flow — a technique for appraising an investment that takes into account the different values of future returns according to when they will be received
  • district of columbia — a federal area in the E United States, on the Potomac, coextensive with the federal capital, Washington. 69 sq. mi. (179 sq. km). Abbreviation: DC (for use with zip code), D.C.
  • doctor of philosophy — Also called doctorate. the highest degree awarded by a graduate school, usually to a person who has completed at least three years of graduate study and a dissertation approved by a board of professors.
  • drink with the flies — to drink alone
  • effective resistance — the resistance to an alternating current, expressed as the ratio of the power dissipated to the square of the effective current.
  • entry qualifications — the qualifications people wishing to enter an organization, university, etc, have to have
  • erythema infectiosum — a mild infectious disease of childhood, caused by a virus, characterized by fever and a red rash spreading from the cheeks to the limbs and trunk
  • essential fatty acid — any fatty acid required by the body in manufacturing prostaglandins, found in such foods as oily fish and nuts
  • exercise, left as an — Used to complete a proof in technical books when one doesn't mind a handwave, or to avoid one entirely. The complete phrase is: "The proof [or "the rest"] is left as an exercise for the reader." This comment *has* occasionally been attached to unsolved research problems by authors possessed of either an evil sense of humour or a vast faith in the capabilities of their audiences.
  • feather in one's cap — one of the horny structures forming the principal covering of birds, consisting typically of a hard, tubular portion attached to the body and tapering into a thinner, stemlike portion bearing a series of slender, barbed processes that interlock to form a flat structure on each side.
  • federal constitution — Constitution of the United States.
  • fight for one's life — Someone who is fighting for their life is making a great effort to stay alive, either when they are being physically attacked or when they are very ill.
  • file descriptor leak — (programming)   (Or "fd leak" /F D leek/) A kind of programming bug analogous to a core leak, in which a program fails to close file descriptors ("fd"s) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually runs out of them. See leak.
  • financial consultant — A financial consultant is the same as a financial adviser.
  • financial instrument — A financial instrument is a document or contract that can be traded in a market, that represents an asset to one party and a liability or equity to the other.
  • financial statements — Financial statements are all of the reports that show how a company is performing for a certain period.
  • finite state grammar — a simplified form of transformational grammar devised by Noam Chomsky
  • finite state machine — (mathematics, algorithm, theory)   (FSM or "Finite State Automaton", "transducer") An abstract machine consisting of a set of states (including the initial state), a set of input events, a set of output events, and a state transition function. The function takes the current state and an input event and returns the new set of output events and the next state. Some states may be designated as "terminal states". The state machine can also be viewed as a function which maps an ordered sequence of input events into a corresponding sequence of (sets of) output events. A deterministic FSM (DFA) is one where the next state is uniquely determinied by a single input event. The next state of a nondeterministic FSM (NFA) depends not only on the current input event, but also on an arbitrary number of subsequent input events. Until these subsequent events occur it is not possible to determine which state the machine is in. It is possible to automatically translate any nondeterministic FSM into a deterministic one which will produce the same output given the same input. Each state in the DFA represents the set of states the NFA might be in at a given time. In a probabilistic FSM [proper name?], there is a predetermined probability of each next state given the current state and input (compare Markov chain). The terms "acceptor" and "transducer" are used particularly in language theory where automata are often considered as abstract machines capable of recognising a language (certain sequences of input events). An acceptor has a single Boolean output and accepts or rejects the input sequence by outputting true or false respectively, whereas a transducer translates the input into a sequence of output events. FSMs are used in computability theory and in some practical applications such as regular expressions and digital logic design. See also state transition diagram, Turing Machine.
  • firearms certificate — a certificate that entitles the holder to own and keep a firearm
  • first earl of cromer — 1st Earl of, Evelyn Baring.
  • first point of aries — the vernal equinox.
  • first world problems — If you say that someone has First World problems, you mean that their problems are not really very important.
  • first-cause argument — an argument for the existence of God, asserting the necessity of an uncaused cause of all subsequent series of causes, on the assumption that an infinite regress is impossible.
  • first-person shooter — a type of video game in which the player assumes the field of vision of the protagonist, so that the game camera includes the character's weapon, but the rest of the character model is not seen. Abbreviation: FPS.
  • fission-track dating — the dating of samples of minerals by comparing the tracks in them by fission fragments of the uranium nuclei they contain, before and after irradiation by neutrons
  • five-a-side football — a version of soccer with five players in each team
  • five-elements school — Yin-Yang School.
  • five-star restaurant — a restaurant which has been given the top star-rating
  • fontainebleau school — a group of artists, many of them Italian and Flemish, who worked on the decorations of the palace of Fontainebleau in the 16th century.
  • football hooliganism — the actions or behaviour of a football hooligan
  • for all one is worth — good or important enough to justify (what is specified): advice worth taking; a place worth visiting.
  • for sb's consumption — If you do or say something for a particular person's or group's consumption, you do or say it especially for them, although your private thoughts or plans may be very different.
  • for sb's delectation — If you do something for someone's delectation, you do it to give them enjoyment or pleasure.
  • forbidden transition — an electronic transition in an atom, molecule, etc, that is not permitted by electric dipole selection rules
  • fore-and-aft topsail — gaff topsail (def 1).
  • formative assessment — ongoing assessment of a pupil's educational development within a particular subject area
  • 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.
  • gaff-topsail catfish — a sea catfish, Bagre marinus, occurring in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico from Cape Cod to Panama, and having the spine of the dorsal fin greatly prolonged and flattened.
  • get one's finger out — to begin or speed up activity, esp after initial delay or slackness
  • heat of condensation — the heat liberated by a unit mass of gas at its boiling point as it condenses to a liquid: equal to the heat of vaporization.
  • house of assignation — a brothel.
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