12-letter words containing s, w, a
- brooks's law — (programming) "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" - a result of the fact that the expected advantage from splitting work among N programmers is O(N) (that is, proportional to N), but the complexity and communications cost associated with coordinating and then merging their work is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to the square of N). The quote is from Fred Brooks, a manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of "The Mythical Man-Month". The myth in question has been most tersely expressed as "Programmer time is fungible" and Brooks established conclusively that it is not. Hackers have never forgotten his advice; too often, management still does. See also creationism, second-system effect, optimism.
- bushwhacking — to make one's way through woods by cutting at undergrowth, branches, etc.
- by wholesale — at wholesale
- by-a-whisker — whiskers, a beard.
- can of worms — a complicated problem
- cape sparrow — a sparrow, Passer melanurus, very common in southern Africa: family Ploceidae
- caraway seed — the pungent aromatic one-seeded fruit of this plant, used in cooking and in medicine
- carriageways — Plural form of carriageway.
- cashew apple — the soft, swollen, pear-shaped stalk of the cashew tree, to which a cashew nut is attached: used in preserves and wine.
- cassel brown — Vandyke brown.
- cauliflowers — Plural form of cauliflower.
- charles drew — Charles Richard, 1904–50, U.S. physician: developer of blood-bank technique.
- charles' law — the principle that all gases expand equally for the same rise of temperature if they are held at constant pressure: also that the pressures of all gases increase equally for the same rise of temperature if they are held at constant volume. The law is now known to be only true for ideal gases
- cheese straw — a long thin cheese-flavoured strip of pastry
- chickasawhay — a river in SE Mississippi, flowing S to the Pascagoula River. 210 miles (338 km) long.
- chinese wall — a notional barrier between the parts of a business, esp between the market makers and brokers of a stock-exchange business, across which no information should pass to the detriment of clients
- chowderheads — Plural form of chowderhead.
- circular saw — A circular saw is a round metal disk with a sharp edge which is used for cutting wood and other materials.
- claw setting — a jewellery setting with clawlike prongs
- cock sparrow — a male sparrow
- contrariwise — from a contrasting point of view; on the other hand
- conway's law — (project, humour) The rule (presumably formulated by Melvin Conway) that the organisation of software and the organisation of the software team will be congruent; originally stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler".
- coomaraswamy — Ananda (Kentish). 1877–1947, Ceylonese art historian and interpreter of Indian culture to the West
- cornishwoman — a woman who is a native or inhabitant of Cornwall
- cotton waste — refuse cotton yarn, esp when used as a cleaning material
- cowardliness — lacking courage; contemptibly timid.
- crosscut saw — a saw for cutting timber across the grain
- crown estate — the property owned by the British Crown; state-owned property
- csk software — (company) An international software company formed by the merger of Quay Financial Software and Micrognosis, and fully owned by CSK Corporation, Japan. CSK Software is based in Frankfurt/Main (Germany) with offices in London (UK), Zurich (Switzerland), Madrid (Spain), and Singapore. Products segments are RDD: Real-time data delivery, main product is Slingshot for delivering real-time data over the Internet (real push technology). ETS: Electronic Trading Systems, price calculation and automatic trading (with connections to XONTRO and XETRA). EAI: Enterprise Application Integration, main product is XGen, a universal message converter with GUI and connections also to SWIFT. E-mail: <[email protected]>. Address: CSK Software AG, Opernplatz 2, D-60313 Frankfurt, Germany. Tel: +49 (69) 509 520. Fax: +49 (69) 5095 2333.
- cylinder saw — crown saw.
- dalton's law — the principle that the pressure exerted by a mixture of gases in a fixed volume is equal to the sum of the pressures that each gas would exert if it occupied the whole volume
- dawson creek — a town in W Canada, in NE British Columbia: SE terminus of the Alaska Highway. Pop: 10 754 (2001)
- deathwatches — Plural form of deathwatch.
- dewar vessel — a container with an evacuated space between two walls that are highly reflective, capable of maintaining its contents at a near-constant temperature over relatively long periods of time; thermos.
- disallowable — to refuse to allow; reject; veto: to disallow a claim for compensation.
- disallowance — to refuse to allow; reject; veto: to disallow a claim for compensation.
- dismal swamp — a swamp in SE Virginia and NE North Carolina. About 30 miles (48 km) long; about 600 sq. mi. (1500 sq. km).
- dovetail saw — a backsaw for fine woodworking, as dovetailing.
- downcastness — The quality of being downcast.
- drawlingness — the quality or characteristic of a drawler
- dust wrapper — dust jacket (sense 1)
- easting down — the passage eastward from the Cape of Good Hope, as made by a sailing ship bound for Australia or the East Indies.
- edwardsville — a town in SW Illinois.
- egg sandwich — two slices of bread filled with chopped egg
- elbow grease — physical effort
- englishwoman — adult female from England
- entranceways — Plural form of entranceway.
- escape wheel — moving part of a timepiece
- false mildew — downy mildew (def 1).
- false-mildew — Also called false mildew. any fungus of the family Peronosporaceae, causing many plant diseases and producing a white, downy mass of conidiophores, usually on the under surface of the leaves of the host plant.