18-letter words containing t, o, a, f
- board of education — a group or agency with responsibility for education
- board of elections — a bipartisan board appointed usually by local authorities and charged with control of elections and voting procedure.
- bore the pants off — to bore extremely
- bounty-fed farmers — farmers who benefit from subsidies
- branch to fishkill — (IBM: from the location of one of the corporation's facilities) Any unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. See jump off into never-never land, hyperspace.
- branching fraction — (in branching) the proportion of the disintegrating nuclei that follow a particular branch to the total number of disintegrating nuclides
- breach of contract — the act of breaking the conditions of a contract
- breach of security — an act that violates a country, area, or building's security measures
- brute force attack — (cryptography) A method of breaking a cipher (that is, to decrypt a specific encrypted text) by trying every possible key. The quicker the brute force attack, the weaker the cipher. Feasibility of brute force attack depends on the key length of the cipher, and on the amount of computational power available to the attacker. Brute force attack is impossible against the ciphers with variable-size key, such as a one-time pad cipher.
- california current — a cold current originating in the northern part of the Pacific Ocean, flowing SE along the coast of W North America.
- cap of maintenance — a ceremonial cap or hat worn or carried as a symbol of office, rank, etc
- cartilaginous fish — any fish of the class Chondrichthyes, including the sharks, skates, and rays, having a skeleton composed entirely of cartilage
- cash-for-questions — of, involved in, or relating to a scandal in which some MPs were accused of accepting bribes to ask particular questions in Parliament
- catherine of siena — Saint. 1347–80, Italian mystic and ascetic; patron saint of the Dominican order. Feast day: April 29
- certification mark — a mark that certifies the origin, material, quality, mode of manufacture, accuracy, or other characteristic of a product or service: “UL” is a certification mark for appliances meeting the safety standards of Underwriters Laboratories, Inc.
- charge of quarters — a member of the armed forces who handles administration in his or her unit, esp after duty hours
- check verification — Check verification is a system that checks national databases of information about individuals to make sure that checks will be honored and fraud is not being committed.
- christian reformed — of or relating to a Protestant denomination (Christian Reformed Church) organized in the U.S. in 1857 by groups that had seceded from the Dutch Reformed Church.
- church of scotland — the established church in Scotland, Calvinist in doctrine and Presbyterian in constitution
- classified section — the part of a publication that contains classified advertising
- claw-and-ball foot — ball-and-claw foot.
- coffee-table music — unadventurous music
- combustion furnace — a furnace used in the laboratory to carry out elemental analysis of organic compounds
- committed facility — an agreement by a bank to provide a customer with funds up to a specified limit at a specified rate of interest
- common data format — (library) (CDF) A library and toolkit based on a self-describing data format for scalar and multidimensional data. CDF aims to be platform- and discipline-independent. A scientific data management package (CDF Library) allows developers to manage data and metadata through APIs. CDF has built-in support for data compression (gZip, RLE, Huffman) and files larger than two gigabytes. There are interfaces for C, FORTRAN, Java, Perl, C#, Visual Basic, IDL and MATLAB.
- compassion fatigue — the inability to react sympathetically to a crisis, disaster, etc, because of overexposure to previous crises, disasters, etc
- configuration item — (jargon) Hardware or software, or an aggregate of both, which is designated by the project configuration manager (or contracting agency) for configuration management.
- continued fraction — a number plus a fraction whose denominator contains a number and a fraction whose denominator contains a number and a fraction, and so on
- contract furniture — furniture designed and manufactured for commercial installation, as in offices, waiting rooms, or lobbies.
- cooking facilities — equipment necessary for cooking
- counterreformation — a reform movement to oppose a previous one
- court of st. james — the British royal court
- crude oil fraction — A crude oil fraction is a component of crude oil, which has its own particular molecular composition, weight, and boiling point.
- cultural diffusion — act of diffusing; state of being diffused.
- curvature of field — a monochromatic aberration of a lens or other optical system in which the focal surface is curved, the refracted image of an object oriented perpendicular to the axis of the lens lying on a curved surface rather than in a plane perpendicular to the axis.
- curvature of space — (in relativity) a property of space near massive bodies in which their gravitational field causes light to travel along curved paths.
- data flow analysis — (programming) A process to discover the dependencies between different data items manipulated by a program. The order of execution in a data driven language is determined solely by the data dependencies. For example, given the equations 1. X = A + B 2. B = 2 + 2 3. A = 3 + 4 a data-flow analysis would find that 2 and 3 must be evaluated before 1. Since there are no data dependencies between 2 and 3, they may be evaluated in any order, including in parallel. This technique is implemented in hardware in some pipelined processors with multiple functional units. It allows instructions to be executed as soon as their inputs are available, independent of the original program order.
- de-differentiation — a process by which structures or behaviors that were specialized for a specific function lose their specialization and become simplified or generalized.
- de-objectification — to present as an object, especially of sight, touch, or other physical sense; make objective; externalize.
- dead-letter office — an office where undeliverable letters were taken for storage
- declaration of war — a formal statement made by one country to another that a state of war now exists between them
- defense calculator — IBM 701
- deficiency account — an account summarizing the financial condition of an individual or company in danger of bankruptcy.
- democratic deficit — any situation in which there is believed to be a lack of democratic accountability and control over the decision-making process
- departure platform — a raised area at a railway station from which passengers can board trains prior to their departing
- disidentifications — Plural form of disidentification.
- dwarf storage unit — (humour) (DSU) An IBM term for a cupboard.
- dysfunctionalities — Plural form of dysfunctionality.
- eleanor of castile — 1246–90, Spanish wife of Edward I of England. Eleanor Crosses were erected at each place at which her body rested between Nottingham, where she died, and London, where she is buried
- electronic warfare — the military use of electronics to prevent or reduce an enemy's effective use and to protect friendly use of electromagnetic radiation equipment