20-letter words containing s, i, g, r
- 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.
- 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.
- frosting on the cake — a sweet mixture, cooked or uncooked, for coating or filling cakes, cookies, and the like; icing.
- fuming sulfuric acid — an oily, hygroscopic, corrosive liquid, H 2 S 2 O 7 , that, depending on purity, is colorless or dark brown: used chiefly as a dehydrating agent in the manufacture of explosives and as a sulfating or sulfonating agent in the manufacture of dyes.
- 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.
- gravitational radius — Schwarzschild radius.
- 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 progression — a series of numbers the reciprocals of which are in arithmetic progression.
- hazard warning lamps — Hazard warning lamps are flashing lamps on each corner of a vehicle that are used to show the position of the vehicle if there has been a breakdown or an accident.
- highbush huckleberry — black huckleberry.
- historical sociology — the sociological study of the origins and development of societies and of other social phenomena that seeks underlying laws and principles.
- hungarian bromegrass — a pasture grass, Bromus inermis, native to Europe, having smooth blades.
- ibm systems engineer — (job) (SE) A software person from IBM.
- ignotum per ignotius — an explanation that is obscurer than the thing to be explained
- industrial espionage — the stealing of technological or commercial research data, blueprints, plans, etc., as by a person in the hire of a competing company.
- industrial sociology — the sociological study of social relationships and social structures in business settings.
- inelastic scattering — a scattering of particles due to an inelastic collision that also changes their wavelengths and phases.
- inertial upper stage — a U.S. two-stage, solid-propellant rocket used to boost a relatively heavy spacecraft from a low earth orbit into a planetary trajectory or an elliptical transfer orbit. Abbreviation: IUS.
- innerspring mattress — a mattress with built-in coil springs
- integration by parts — Mathematics. a method of evaluating an integral by use of the formula, ∫udv = uv − ∫vdu.
- integrity constraint — (database) A constraint (rule) that must remain true for a database to preserve data integrity. Integrity constraints are specified at database creation time and enforced by the database management system. Examples from a genealogical database would be that every individual must be their parent's child or that they can have no more than two natural parents.
- intelligence service — the government department that is responsible for collecting and analyzing information about enemies
- intervening sequence — a noncoding segment in a length of DNA that interrupts a gene-coding sequence or nontranslated sequence, the corresponding segment being removed from the RNA copy before transcription.