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24-letter words containing s, y, n

  • quick-assembly furniture — furniture such as shelves and cupboards which you buy as a number of separate pieces and assemble yourself
  • rapid eye movement sleep — REM sleep.
  • referential transparency — (programming)   An expression E is referentially transparent if any subexpression and its value (the result of evaluating it) can be interchanged without changing the value of E. This is not the case if the value of an expression depends on global state which can change value. The most common example of changing global state is assignment to a global variable. For example, if y is a global variable in: f(x) { return x+y; } g(z) { a = f(1); y = y + z; return a + f(1); } function g has the "side-effect" that it alters the value of y. Since f's result depends on y, the two calls to f(1) will return different results even though the argument is the same. Thus f is not referentially transparent. Changing the order of evaluation of the statements in g will change its result. We could make f above referentially transparent by passing in y as an argument: f(x, y) = x+y Similarly, g would need to take y as an argument and return its new value as part of the result: g(z, y) { a = f(1, y); y' = y+z; return (a + f(1, y'), y'); } Referentially transparent programs are more amenable to formal methods and easier to reason about because the meaning of an expression depends only on the meaning of its subexpressions and not on the order of evaluation or side-effects of other expressions. We can stretch the concept of referential transparency to include input and output if we consider the whole program to be a function from its input to its output. The program as a whole is referentially transparent because it will always produce the same output when given the same input. This is stretching the concept because the program's input may include what the user types, the content of certain files or even the time of day. If we do not consider global state like the contents of files as input, then writing to a file and reading what was written behaves just like assignment to a global variable. However, if we must consider the state of the universe as an input rather than global state then any deterministic system would be referentially transparent! See also extensional equality, observational equivalence.
  • repetitive strain injury — overuse strain injury
  • representative democracy — a person or thing that represents another or others.
  • responsibility allowance — payment made to somebody who has special responsibilities
  • reverse annuity mortgage — a type of home mortgage under which an elderly homeowner is allowed a long-term loan in the form of monthly payments against his or her paid-off equity as collateral, repayable when the home is eventually sold. Abbreviation: RAM.
  • rocky mountain whitefish — mountain whitefish.
  • saint ignatius of loyola — Saint Ignatius of (Iñigo López de Loyola) 1491–1556, Spanish soldier and ecclesiastic: founder of the Society of Jesus.
  • san joaquin valley fever — coccidioidomycosis.
  • scottish country dancing — a type of Scottish folk dancing, including reels, jigs, and strathspeys, in which couples are arranged in sets and perform a series of movements, esp facing one another in a line
  • secondary school teacher — a person who teaches at a secondary school
  • self-fulfilling prophecy — a prophecy that comes true because of the expectation that it will
  • sequentially compact set — a set in which every sequence has a subsequence that converges to a point of the set.
  • shadow foreign secretary — the member of the main opposition party in Parliament who would hold the office of Foreign Secretary if their party were in power
  • single european currency — the official currency, also known as the Euro, of some of the members of the European Union
  • sorrows of young werther — German Die Leiden des Jungen Werther. a romantic novel (1774) in epistolary form by Goethe.
  • staggered pin grid array — (hardware)   (SPGA) A style of integrated circuit socket or pin-out with a staggered grid of pins around the edge of the socket, positioned as several squares, one inside the other. SPGA is commonly used on motherboards for processors, e.g. Socket 5, Socket 7 and Socket 8. See also PGA.
  • steak and kidney pudding — beefsteak and kidney in a suet pastry crust, steamed in a basin.
  • succinylcholine chloride — a crystalline compound, C 1 4 H 3 0 Cl 2 N 2 O 4 , used as a skeletal muscle relaxant in surgical procedures.
  • superheterodyne receiver — a radio receiver that combines two radio-frequency signals by heterodyne action, to produce a signal above the audible frequency limit. This signal is amplified and demodulated to give the desired audio-frequency signal
  • synchronous graphics ram — Synchronous Graphics Random Access Memory
  • syquest technology, inc. — (company, hardware)   An early entrant into the removable hard disk market for personal computers. For may years SyQuest held the market, particularly as a method of transferring large desktop publisher documents to printers. SyQuest aim their products to give personal computer users "endless" hard drive space for data-intensive applications like desktop publishing, Internet information management, pre-press, multimedia, audio, video, digital photography, fast backup, data exchange, archiving, confidential data security and easy portability for the road. At the top of their current (Mar 1997) range are two drives, The SyJet 1.5 GB a 3.5 inch, double platter removable drive and the EZFlyer 230 MB also on 3.5 inch media. A cartridge holding over 4.7GB is promised before the end of 1997. In recent years they have not fared as well in the market, whilst Iomega has cornered the Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) market. Over the period 1995 to 1997 sales declined resulting in a series of losses. In the first quarter of 1997 these losses had been reduced to $6.8 million with net revenues increasing to $48.3 million. This compares to a net loss of $33.8 million, or $2.98 per share, on net revenues of $78.7 million for the same period the year before. It would appear that substantial restructuring has occurred over the past few years.
  • system management server — (operating system)   (SMS) Software used by Microsoft Windows NT system administrators to manage personal computers on any size network. SMS can distribute software to desktops from one central location, detect every machine on the network, track software and hardware configurations, send key information back to a central database, and perform other tasks.
  • telephony user interface — (communications)   (TUI) Either a software interface to telephony (e.g. a phone-capable PC) or a DTMF-based interface to software (e.g. voicemail).
  • that goes without saying — that is self-evident
  • the way things are going — You can use the way things are going to indicate that you expect something to happen because of the way the present situation is developing.
  • thorn in your side/flesh — If you describe someone or something as a thorn in your side or a thorn in your flesh, you mean that they are a continuous problem to you or annoy you.
  • to cramp someone's style — If someone or something cramps your style, their presence or existence restricts your behaviour in some way.
  • to have seen better days — If you say that something has seen better days, you mean that it is old and in poor condition.
  • to keep something at bay — If you keep something or someone at bay, or hold them at bay, you prevent them from reaching, attacking, or affecting you.
  • to lay something to rest — If you lay something such as fears or rumours to rest or if you put them to rest, you succeed in proving that they are not true.
  • to make boundary changes — to change the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies, because of population shifts
  • to tie yourself in knots — If you tie yourself in knots, you get very confused and anxious.
  • transpersonal psychology — a branch of psychology or psychotherapy that recognizes altered states of consciousness and transcendent experiences as a means to understand the human mind and treat psychological disordrs.
  • tricyclic antidepressant — pertaining to or embodying three cycles.
  • trotskyist international — Fourth International.
  • twenty-four-hour service — a banking service that is always available
  • twenty-seventh amendment — an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1992, ensuring that no laws relating to Congressional salaries take effect until after the next Congressional election.
  • under the sway of sb/sth — If you are under the sway of someone or something, they have great influence over you.
  • under-secretary of state — any of various high officials subordinate only to the minister in charge of a department
  • unfederated malay states — a former group of native states in the Malay Peninsula that became British protectorates between 1885 and 1909. All except Brunei joined the Malayan Union (later Federation of Malaya) in 1946. Brunei joined the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 but later became an independent nation
  • visual component library — (programming)   VCL A application framework library for Microsoft Windows and Borland Software Corp.'s Delphi and C++Builder rapid application development software. VCL was originally designed for Delphi but is now also used for C++Builder. This replaces OWL Object Windows Library as Borland's Windows C++ framework of choice. VCL encapsulates the C-based Win32 API into a much easier to use, object-oriented form. Like its direct rival, Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC), VCL includes classes to create Windows programs. The VCL component class can be inherited to create new VCL components, which are the building blocks of Delphi and C++Builder applications. VCL components are somewhat in competition with ActiveX controls, though a VCL wrapper can be created to make an ActiveX control seem like a VCL component.
  • water of crystallization — water of hydration, formerly thought necessary to crystallization: now usually regarded as affecting crystallization only as it forms new molecular combinations.
  • ways and means committee — a standing committee of the US House of Representatives that supervises all financial legislation
  • webster-ashburton treaty — U.S. History. an agreement between the U.S. and England (1842) defining the boundary between British and American territory from Maine to present-day Minnesota.
  • which way the wind blows — air in natural motion, as that moving horizontally at any velocity along the earth's surface: A gentle wind blew through the valley. High winds were forecast.
  • win (or lose) by a neck — to win (or lose) by the length of a horse's head and neck
  • your heart is not in sth — If your heart isn't in the thing you are doing, you have very little enthusiasm for it, usually because you are depressed or are thinking about something else.
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