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25-letter words containing t, r, i

  • be perturbed at something — to be alarmed at something
  • be riddled with something — to be full of or pervaded by something undesirable
  • beard the lion in his den — to approach a feared or influential person, esp in order to ask a favour
  • beat someone's brains out — to kill by knocking severely about the head
  • berkeley quality software — (abuse)   (Often abbreviated "BQS") Term used in a pejorative sense to refer to software that was apparently created by rather spaced-out hackers late at night to solve some unique problem. It usually has nonexistent, incomplete, or incorrect documentation, has been tested on at least two examples, and core dumps when anyone else attempts to use it. This term was frequently applied to early versions of the "dbx(1)" debugger. See also Berzerkeley.
  • bernardin de saint-pierre — Jacques Henˈri (ʒɑkɑ̃ˈʀi) ; zhäkänrēˈ) 1737-1814; Fr. writer
  • better the devil you know — If you say better the devil you know or better the devil you know than the devil you don't know, you mean that you would prefer to have contact with or do business with a person you already know, even though you don't like them, than with a person you don't know.
  • black-crowned night heron — any of several thick-billed, crepuscular or nocturnal herons of the genus Nycticorax and related genera, as N. nycticorax (black-crowned night heron) of the Old and New Worlds, and Nyctanassa violacea (yellow-crowned night heron) of America.
  • blow someone's brains out — To blow someone's brains out means to shoot them in the head, killing them.
  • bring pressure to bear on — If you bring pressure or influence to bear on someone, you use it to try and persuade them to do something.
  • british red cross society — the British branch of the Red Cross Society
  • british union of fascists — the British fascist party founded by Sir Oswald Mosley (1932), which advocated a strong corporate state and promoted anti-Semitism
  • brute force and ignorance — (jargon)   (BFI) A popular design technique at many software houses - brute force coding unrelieved by any knowledge of how problems have been previously solved in elegant ways. Dogmatic adherence to design methods tends to encourage this sort of thing. Characteristic of early larval stage programming; unfortunately, many never outgrow it. Also encountered in the variants BFMI - brute force and massive ignorance, and BFBI - brute force and bloody ignorance. "Gak, they used a bubble sort! That's strictly BFI." Compare bogosity.
  • by the skin of your teeth — If you do something by the skin of your teeth, you just manage to do it.
  • caltech intermediate form — (language)   (CIF) A geometry language for VLSI design, in which the primitives are coloured rectangles.
  • canyonlands national park — a national park in SE Utah, at the junction of the Colorado and Green rivers: site of geologic interest. 527 sq. mi. (1366 sq. km).
  • capability maturity model — (software)   (CMM) The Software Engineering Institute's model of software engineering that specifies five levels of maturity of the processes of a software organisation. CMM offers a framework for evolutionary process improvement. Originally applied to software development (SE-CMM), it has been expanded to cover other areas including Human Resources and Software Acquitition. The levels - focii - and key process areas are: Level 1 Initial - Heroes - None. Level 2 Repeatable - Project Management - Software Project Planning, Software Project Tracking and Oversight, Software Subcontract Management, Software Quality Assurance, Software Configuration Management, Requirements Management. Level 3 Defined - Engineering Process - Organisation Process Focus, Organisation Process Definition, Peer Reviews, Training Program, Inter-group Coordination, Software Product Engineering, Integrated Software Management. Level 4 Managed - Product and Process Quality - Software Quality Management, Quantitative Process Management. Level 5 Optimising - Continuous Improvement - Process Change Management, Technology Change Management, Defect Prevention.
  • case integration services — (standard, programming)   (CIS) A committee formed to discuss CASE tool integration standards related to ATIS.
  • catholic apostolic church — a nearly extinct English Protestant church established between 1832 and 1835, stressing the imminent coming of the millennium and the reestablishment of the primitive church's ministries.
  • cauchy-schwarz inequality — Schwarz inequality (def 2).
  • certificate of enrollment — a document issued to a U.S. vessel of 20 tons gross or more, engaged in fishing or in trade along the U.S. coast, on the Great Lakes, or on U.S. inland waters.
  • certificate of unruliness — (in Britain) the decision of a juvenile court that a young person on remand is too unmanageable for local-authority care and should be taken into custody
  • character encoding scheme — character encoding
  • characteristic polynomial — an expression obtained from a given matrix by taking the determinant of the difference between the matrix and an arbitrary variable times the identity matrix.
  • cheshire west and chester — a unitary authority in NW England. Administrative centre: Chester. Pop: 328 100 (2008 est). Area: 917 sq km (354 sq miles)
  • cheyne-stokes respiration — respiration characterized by cycles of deep, rapid breathing and weak, slow breathing, as in cases of heart failure or coma
  • chief information officer — (job)   (CIO) The person who determines the overall strategic direction and business contribution of the information systems function in a business.
  • chief of naval operations — the highest officer in the U.S. Navy and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
  • child protection register — (in Britain) a confidential list of children who are at continuing risk of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse or neglect
  • child-resistant container — A child-resistant container is a container designed to be difficult for a child to open.
  • circle of least confusion — the smallest cross section in a beam of paraxial rays, lying in the plane of least spherical aberration.
  • client to client protocol — (networking)   (CTCP) A type of protocol created to allow structured data such as font information to be exchanged between users on IRC. It is also used to send a query to a user. The available CTCP commands include VERSION, FINGER, DCC CHAT, DCC SEND, TIME, PING, ECHO, CLIENTINFO. Some commands are not available on some IRC client software.
  • closed-circuit television — a television system in which signals are transmitted from a television camera to the receivers by cables or telephone links forming a closed circuit, as used in security systems, etc
  • co-ordinating conjunction — A co-ordinating conjunction is a word such as 'and', 'or', or 'but' which joins two or more words, groups, or clauses of equal status, for example two main clauses. Compare subordinating conjunction.
  • colony-stimulating factor — any of a number of substances, secreted by the bone marrow, that cause stem cells to proliferate and differentiate, forming colonies of specific blood cells. Synthetic forms are being tested for their ability to reduce the toxic effects of chemotherapy
  • commissioner of education — (in the US) the head of a state's education department
  • common object file format — (file format)   (COFF) The executable file and object file format used by Unix System V Release 3 and later.
  • commonwealth of australia — Australia's official title
  • communication engineering — the branch of engineering that deals with telecommunications and computer programming and networking.
  • community support officer — a uniformed officer who is not a member of the police force but who has certain powers to be exercised in supplementing the role of the police, esp crowd control, tackling anti-social behaviour, etc
  • compensated semiconductor — a semiconductor in which donors and acceptors are related in such a way that their opposing electrical effects are partially cancelled
  • complementarity principle — the principle that experiments on physical systems of atomic size or smaller, as electrons or photons, can exhibit either particle or wave behavior but not both simultaneously.
  • complete inference system — (logic)   An inference system A is complete with respect to another system B if A can reach every conclusion which is true in B. The dual to completeness is soundness.
  • complete partial ordering — (theory)   (cpo) A partial ordering of a set under a relation, where all directed subsets have a least upper bound. A cpo is usually defined to include a least element, bottom (David Schmidt calls this a pointed cpo). A cpo which is algebraic and boundedly complete is a (Scott) domain.
  • computer-aided publishing — desktop publishing. Abbreviation: CAP.
  • conductiometric titration — a titration technique in which the end-point is determined by measuring the conductance of the solution
  • configuration programming — (programming)   An approach that advocates the use of a separate configuration language to specify the coarse-grain structure of programs. Configuration programming is particularly attractive for concurrent, parallel and distributed systems that have inherently complex program structures.
  • constant angular velocity — (storage)   (CAV) One of the two schemes for controlling the rate of rotation of the disk in a disk drive. Constant angular velocity keeps the rate of rotation constant. This means that the linear velocity of the disk under the head is larger when reading or writing the outer tracks. This in turn implies either a variation in the data rate to and from the heads or the bits per unit length along the track. The alternative, constant linear velocity, requires the rate of rotation of the disk to accelerate and decelerate according to the radial postion of the heads, increasing the energy use and vibration.
  • constant applicative form — (functional programming)   (CAF) A supercombinator which is not a lambda abstraction. This includes truly constant expressions such as 12, (+ 1 2), [1, 2, 3] as well as partially applied functions such as (+ 4). Note that this last example is equivalent under eta abstraction to \ x . + 4 x which is not a CAF. Since a CAF is a supercombinator, it contains no free variables. Moreover, since it is not a lambda abstraction it contains no variables at all. It may however contain identifiers which refer to other CAFs, e.g. c 3 where c = (* 2). A CAF can always be lifted to the top level of the program. It can either be compiled to a piece of graph which will be shared by all uses or to some shared code which will overwrite itself with some graph the first time it is evaluated. A CAF such as ints = from 1 where from n = n : from (n+1) can grow without bound but may only be accessible from within the code of one or more functions. In order for the garbage collector to be able to reclaim such structures, we associate with each function a list of the CAFs to which it refers. When garbage collecting a reference to the function we collect the CAFs on its list.
  • constructional homonymity — the property of a string of morphemes that is susceptible of two or more syntactic analyses, as in Flying planes can be dangerous, planes may be either the object of flying or the subject of can.
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