22-letter words containing u, c, h
- frequency shift keying — (communications) (FSK) The use of frequency modulation to transmit digital data, i.e. two different carrier frequencies are used to represent zero and one. FSK was originally used to transmit teleprinter messages by radio (RTTY) but can be used for most other types of radio and land-line digital telegraphy. More than two frequencies can be used to increase transmission rates.
- go through one's paces — to show one's abilities, skills, etc.
- grand duchy of muscovy — Muscovy (def 1).
- graphical display unit — an output device incorporating a cathode ray tube on which both line drawings and text can be displayed. It is usually used in conjunction with a light pen to input or reposition data
- gum bichromate process — a contact printing method in which the image is formed on a coating of sensitized gum containing a suitable colored pigment and potassium or ammonium dichromate.
- hague peace conference — a meeting held at The Hague, Netherlands, in 1899, that established The Hague Permanent Court of Arbitration.
- highway contract route — a route for carrying mail over the highway between designated points, given on contract to a private carrier and often requiring, in rural areas, delivery to home mailboxes. Abbreviation: HCR.
- historical linguistics — the study of changes in a language or group of languages over a period of time.
- homologous chromosomes — two chromosomes, one of paternal origin, the other of maternal origin, that are identical in appearance and pair during meiosis
- hubble space telescope — U.S. Aerospace. a 7.9-foot (2.4-meter) optical telescope designed for use in orbit around the earth.
- human interface device — (hardware) (HID) Any device to interact directly with humans (mostly input) like keyboard, mouse, joystick, or graphics tablet.
- hybrid multiprocessing — (parallel) (HMP) The kind of multitasking which OS/2 supports. HMP provides some elements of symmetric multiprocessing, using add-on IBM software called MP/2. OS/2 SMP was planned for release in late 1993.
- if push comes to shove — to press upon or against (a thing) with force in order to move it away.
- industrial archaeology — the study of past industrial machines, works, etc
- instruction scheduling — The compiler phase that orders instructions on a pipelined, superscalar, or VLIW architecture so as to maximise the number of function units operating in parallel and to minimise the time they spend waiting for each other. Examples are filling a delay slot; interspersing floating-point instructions with integer instructions to keep both units operating; making adjacent instructions independent, e.g. one which writes a register and another which reads from it; separating memory writes to avoid filling the write buffer. Norman P. Jouppi and David W. Wall, "Available Instruction-Level Parallelism for Superscalar and Superpipelined Processors", Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pp. 272--282, 1989.
- isthmus of tehuantepec — the narrowest part of S Mexico, with the Bay of Campeche on the north coast and the Gulf of Tehuantepec (an inlet of the Pacific) on the south coast
- jacquard, joseph-marie — Joseph-Marie Jacquard
- just around the corner — in the next street
- label switching router — (networking) (LSR) A device that typically resides somewhere in the middle of a network and is capable of forwarding datagrams by label switching. In many cases, especially early versions of MPLS networks, a LSR will typically be a modified ATM switch that forwards datagrams based upon a label in the VPI/VCI field.
- landscape architecture — the art of arranging or modifying the features of a landscape, an urban area, etc., for aesthetic or practical reasons.
- local shared resources — (operating system) (LSR) A way of controlling VSAM buffers in OS/390.
- make common cause with — join forces
- mathematical induction — induction (def 5).
- mcculloch-pitts neuron — (artificial intelligence) The basic building block of artificial neural networks. It receives one or more inputs and produces one or more identical outputs, each of which is a simple non-linear function of the sum of the inputs to the neuron. The non-linear function is typically a threshhold or step function which is usually smoothed (i.e. a sigmoid) to facilitate learning.
- much ado about nothing — a comedy (1598?) by Shakespeare.
- negative hallucination — an apparent abnormal inability to perceive an object
- nonspecific urethritis — nongonococcal urethritis.
- north atlantic current — an ocean current flowing NE toward the British Isles, formed by the convergence of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current SE of Newfoundland.
- occupational therapist — professional who assists with rehabilitation
- ousterhout's dichotomy — (language) John Ousterhout's division of high-level languages into "system programming languages" and "scripting languages". This distinction underlies the design of his language Tcl. System programming languages (or "applications languages") are strongly typed, allow arbitrarily complex data structures, and programs in them are compiled, and are meant to operate largely independently of other programs. Prototypical system programming languages are C and Modula-2. By contrast, scripting languages (or "glue languages") are weakly typed or untyped, have little or no provision for complex data structures, and programs in them ("scripts") are interpreted. Scripts need to interact either with other programs (often as glue) or with a set of functions provided by the interpreter, as with the file system functions provided in a UNIX shell and with Tcl's GUI functions. Prototypical scripting languages are AppleScript, C Shell, MS-DOS batch files and Tcl. Many believe that this is a highly arbitrary dichotomy, and refer to it as "Ousterhout's fallacy" or "Ousterhout's false dichotomy". While strong-versus-weak typing, data structure complexity, and independent versus stand-alone might be said to be unrelated features, the usual critique of Ousterhout's dichotomy is of its distinction of compilation versus interpretation, since neither semantics nor syntax depend significantly on whether code is compiled into machine-language, interpreted, tokenized, or byte-compiled at the start of each run, or any mixture of these. Many languages fall between being interpreted or compiled (e.g. Lisp, Forth, UCSD Pascal, Perl, and Java). This makes compilation versus interpretation a dubious parameter in a taxonomy of programming languages.
- peanut-butter sandwich — a sandwich with a filling of peanut-butter
- phosphorus trichloride — a clear, colorless, fuming liquid, PCl 3 , used chiefly in organic synthesis as a chlorinating agent.
- polymyalgia rheumatica — a chronic inflammatory disease, common among older persons, characterized by recurrent episodes of muscle pain and stiffness, sometimes leading to cardiovascular complications or blindness.
- public housing project — a group of homes for poorer families which is funded and controlled by the local government
- public service vehicle — a bus or coach
- quantitative character — a character or trait that is transmitted by quantitative inheritance.
- quantum chromodynamics — a quantum field theory that describes quarks and gluons and their interactions, with the color of the quarks playing a role analogous to that of electric charge. Abbreviation: QCD. Also called chromodynamics. Compare color (def 18).
- quarter inch cartridge — (storage) /kwik/ (QIC) a type of magnetic tape and tape drive. Development standards for QIC make it possible for tapes written on one QIC drive to be read on another. QIC drives are made to work with different lengths of tape. The model number of the drive consists of QIC followed by a number which indicates the drives tape capacity in megabytes (MB).
- queen's bench division — (in England when the sovereign is female) one of the divisions of the High Court of Justice
- request for technology — (RFT) The process established by the OSF to get proposals for new standards.
- rocky mountain bighorn — bighorn.
- rubber-chicken circuit — a monotonous round of dinners, often featuring chicken, that a lecturer or political candidate is obliged to attend.
- saturday night special — a cheap, small-caliber handgun that is easily obtainable and concealable.
- saturday-night special — a cheap, small-caliber handgun that is easily obtainable and concealable.
- save the children fund — a development agency which raises money for deprived children around the world
- search the fucking web — (web, jargon) (Always abbreviated STFW) A response implying that an inquirer could have easily found an answer to his question using Google or some other web search engine. It is now often quicker and more productive to search the World-Wide Web than to RTFM.
- south african republic — former name of Transvaal.
- south atlantic current — an eastward-flowing ocean current formed by the merging of the Brazil Current and the southward-flowing current near the Falkland Islands and forming the southern part of the general circulation of the South Atlantic Ocean.
- south sandwich islands — a group of volcanic islands, administered by England, in the South Atlantic Ocean: part of the Falkland Islands dependency. 120 sq. mi. (310 sq. km).
- southern redbelly dace — any of the small, brightly colored North American freshwater cyprinids, especially Phoxinus oreas (northern redbelly dace) and P. erythrogaster (southern redbelly dace)