18-letter words containing t, a, g, n, r
- fragmentation bomb — a bomb designed to break into many small, high-velocity fragments when detonated.
- free-range poultry — poultry kept in natural nonintensive conditions
- fringe-toed lizard — an iguanid lizard, Uma notata, of sandy deserts of the western U.S. and Mexico, having a wedge-shaped snout and toes fringed with long, pointed scales.
- front organization — business: cover-up
- fulminating powder — powder that explodes by percussion.
- fuming nitric acid — a colorless, yellowish, or brownish fuming corrosive liquid, usually prepared from nitric acid by the addition of excess nitrogen dioxide: used in organic synthesis for nitration, and as an oxidizer in liquid propellants for rockets.
- functional program — (language) A program employing the functional programming approach or written in a functional language.
- funding operations — the conversion of government floating stock or short-term debt into holdings of long-term bonds
- gamma distribution — a continuous two-parameter distribution from which the chi-square and exponential distributions are derived, written Gamma (α. β), where α and β are greater than zero, and defined in terms of the gamma function
- garbage collection — (programming) (GC) The process by which dynamically allocated storage is reclaimed during the execution of a program. The term usually refers to automatic periodic storage reclamation by the garbage collector (part of the run-time system), as opposed to explicit code to free specific blocks of memory. Automatic garbage collection is usually triggered during memory allocation when the amount free memory falls below some threshold or after a certain number of allocations. Normal execution is suspended and the garbage collector is run. There are many variations on this basic scheme. Languages like Lisp represent expressions as graphs built from cells which contain pointers and data. These languages use automatic dynamic storage allocation to build expressions. During the evaluation of an expression it is necessary to reclaim space which is used by subexpressions but which is no longer pointed to by anything. This reclaimed memory is returned to the free memory pool for subsequent reallocation. Without garbage collection the program's memory requirements would increase monotonically throughout execution, possibly exceeding system limits on virtual memory size. The three main methods are mark-sweep garbage collection, reference counting and copying garbage collection. See also the AI koan about garbage collection.
- garden loosestrife — any of various plants belonging to the genus Lysimachia, of the primrose family, having clusters of usually yellow flowers, as L. vulgaris (garden loosestrife) or L. quadrifolia (whorled loosestrife)
- gastroduodenostomy — See under gastroenterostomy.
- gastroenterologist — the study of the structure, functions, and diseases of digestive organs.
- general anesthesia — induced unconsciousness
- general contractor — a person who contracts to construct a building or buildings, for a stipulated sum, in accordance with certain plans and specifications, or to remodel or build an addition to a building
- general relativity — the state or fact of being relative.
- general san martin — a city in E Argentina, a suburb of Buenos Aires.
- generating station — a power station
- generative grammar — a linguistic theory that attempts to describe the tacit knowledge that a native speaker has of a language by establishing a set of explicit, formalized rules that specify or generate all the possible grammatical sentences of a language, while excluding all unacceptable sentences. Compare transformational grammar.
- genetic algorithms — genetic algorithm
- gensym corporation — (company) A company that supplies software and services for intelligent operations management. Common applications include quality management, process optimisation, dynamic scheduling, network management, energy and environmental management, and process modelling and simulation. Their products include G2.
- gentleman-commoner — (formerly) a member of a class of commoners enjoying special privileges at Oxford University.
- german east africa — a former German territory in E Africa, the area now comprised of continental Tanzania and the independent republics of Rwanda and Burundi.
- get the upper hand — gain advantage
- gilbert and george — a team of artists, Gilbert Proesch, Italian, born 1942, and George Passmore, British, born 1943: noted esp for their photomontages and performance works
- gladden sb's heart — If you say that something gladdens someone's heart, you mean that it makes them feel pleased and hopeful.
- going to jerusalem — musical chairs.
- golden bantam corn — a horticultural variety of sweet corn having yellow kernels.
- golden gate bridge — a bridge connecting N California with San Francisco peninsula. 4200-foot (1280-meter) center span.
- good samaritan law — a law that exempts from legal liability persons, sometimes only physicians, who give reasonable aid to strangers in grave physical distress.
- graduated cylinder — a narrow, cylindrical container marked with horizontal lines to represent units of measurement and used to precisely measure the volume of liquids.
- grammatical gender — gender based on arbitrary assignment, without regard to the referent of a noun, as in French le livre (masculine), “the book,” and German das Mädchen (neuter), “the girl.”.
- grampian mountains — a mountain system of central Scotland, extending from the southwest to the northeast and separating the Highlands from the Lowlands. Highest peak: Ben Nevis, 1344 m (4408 ft)
- grand canyon state — Arizona (used as a nickname).
- grand penitentiary — See under penitentiary (def 3).
- grand traverse bay — an inlet of Lake Michigan on the NW of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan.
- grandfather clause — U.S. History. a clause in the constitutions of some Southern states after 1890 intended to permit whites to vote while disfranchising blacks: it exempted from new literacy and property qualifications for voting those men entitled to vote before 1867 and their lineal descendants.
- granulated surface — a roughened surface
- granulation tissue — tissue formed in ulcers and in early wound healing and repair, composed largely of newly growing capillaries and so called from its irregular surface in open wounds; proud flesh.
- gravitational lens — a heavy, dense body, as a galaxy, that lies along our line of sight to a more distant object, as a quasar, and whose gravitational field refracts the light of that object, splitting it into multiple images as seen from the earth.
- gravitational mass — the mass of a body as measured by its gravitational attraction for other bodies.
- gravitational pull — force of gravity
- gravitational wave — (in general relativity) a propagating wave of gravitational energy produced by accelerating masses, especially during catastrophic events, as the gravitational collapse of massive stars.
- gravity escapement — an escapement, used especially in large outdoor clocks, in which the impulse is given to the pendulum by means of a weight falling through a certain distance.
- great expectations — a novel (1861) by Charles Dickens.
- great pastern bone — the part of the foot of a horse, cow, etc., between the fetlock and the hoof.
- great sandy desert — a desert in NW Australia. About 300 miles (485 km) long; 500 miles (800 km) wide; about 160,000 sq. mi. (414,400 sq. km).
- greater manchester — a metropolitan county in central England, with the city of Manchester as its center. 498 sq. mi. (1290 sq. km).
- greater periwinkle — a Eurasian apocynaceous evergreen plant of the genus Vinca, V. major, having trailing stems and blue flowers
- greater roadrunner — either of two large terrestrial cuckoos of the genus Geococcyx of arid regions of the western U.S., Mexico, and Central America, especially G. californianus (greater roadrunner)