20-letter words containing u, n, f, r, i
- frequency modulation — FM.
- friar minor capuchin — capuchin (def 4).
- fulminate of mercury — a gray, crystalline solid, Hg(CNO) 2 , used chiefly in the manufacture of commercial and military detonators.
- fuming sulfuric acid — an oily, hygroscopic, corrosive liquid, H 2 S 2 O 7 , that, depending on purity, is colorless or dark brown: used chiefly as a dehydrating agent in the manufacture of explosives and as a sulfating or sulfonating agent in the manufacture of dyes.
- fundamental particle — elementary particle.
- get one's finger out — to begin or speed up activity, esp after initial delay or slackness
- godefroy de bouillon — c1060–1100, French crusader.
- grand unified theory — a possible future quantum field theory that would encompass both the electroweak theory and quantum chromodynamics. Abbreviation: GUT.
- gregory of nazianzus — Saint. ?329–89 ad, Cappadocian theologian: bishop of Caesarea (370–79). Feast days: Jan 2, 25, and 30
- group life insurance — a form of life insurance available to members of a group, typically employees of a company, under a master policy.
- hexafluoroantimonate — (inorganic chemistry) The anion SbF6- or any salt containing this anion; it is used as an acidic catalyst in epoxide opening reactions.
- houses of parliament — In Britain, the Houses of Parliament are the British parliament, which consists of two parts, the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The buildings where the British parliament does its work are also called the Houses of Parliament.
- hurricane-force wind — a wind, not necessarily a hurricane, having a speed of more than 72 miles per hour (32 m/sec): the strongest of the winds.
- hydraulic fracturing — a process in which fractures in rocks below the earth's surface are opened and widened by injecting chemicals and liquids at high pressure: used especially to extract natural gas or oil.
- hydrodesulfurization — desulfurization by catalytic agents of the sulfur-rich hydrocarbons obtained from petroleum or the like during cracking or hydrocracking.
- ideal of pure reason — God, seen as an idea of pure reason unifying the personal soul with the cosmos.
- in (or out of) gear — (not) connected to the motor
- in (or out of) play — in (or not in) the condition for continuing play
- in a state of nature — completely naked
- in the lap of luxury — If you say that someone lives in the lap of luxury, you mean that they live in conditions of great comfort and wealth.
- in the nature of sth — If you say that one thing is in the nature of another, you mean that it is like the other thing.
- inferior conjunction — the alignment of an inferior planet between the sun and the earth.
- information builders — Distributors of LEVEL5 OBJECT. Telephone +1 800 969 INFO.
- information industry — businesses that involve collecting and using information
- instruction prefetch — (architecture) A technique which attempts to minimise the time a processor spends waiting for instructions to be fetched from memory. Instructions following the one currently being executed are loaded into a prefetch queue when the processor's external bus is otherwise idle. If the processor executes a branch instruction or receives an interrupt then the queue must be flushed and reloaded from the new address. Instruction prefetch is often combined with pipelining in an attempt to keep the pipeline busy. By 1995 most processors used prefetching, e.g. Motorola 680x0, Intel 80x86.
- intestinal fortitude — courage; resoluteness; endurance; guts: to have intestinal fortitude.
- isochronous transfer — isochronous
- joint life insurance — life insurance covering two or more persons, the benefits of which are paid after the first person dies.
- junior featherweight — a boxer weighing up to 122 pounds (54.9 kg), between bantamweight and featherweight.
- law of superposition — Geology. a basic law of geochronology, stating that in any undisturbed sequence of rocks deposited in layers, the youngest layer is on top and the oldest on bottom, each layer being younger than the one beneath it and older than the one above it.
- life-support machine — A life-support machine is the equipment that is used to keep a person alive when they are very ill and cannot breathe without help.
- like a house on fire — If two people get on like a house on fire, they quickly become close friends, for example because they have many interests in common.
- liquidity preference — (in Keynesian economics) the degree of individual preference for cash over less liquid assets.
- logarithmic function — a function defined by y = log bx, especially when the base, b, is equal to e, the base of natural logarithms.
- longitudinal framing — a system for framing steel vessels in which light, closely spaced, longitudinal frames are connected by heavy, widely spaced transverse frames with deep webs.
- mitral insufficiency — abnormal closure of the mitral valve resulting in regurgitation of blood into the atrium and leading to reduced heart function or heart failure.
- most general unifier — (logic) If U is the most general unifier of a set of expressions then any other unifier, V, can be expressed as V = UW, where W is another substitution. See also unification.
- naturalistic fallacy — the supposed fallacy of inferring evaluative conclusions from purely factual premises
- occupation franchise — the right of a tenant to vote in national and local elections
- paper qualifications — qualifications gained through official examinations, etc, rather than through experience
- pappus of alexandria — 3rd century bc, Greek mathematician, whose eight-volume Synagoge is a valuable source of information about Greek mathematics
- period of revolution — a rather large interval of time that is meaningful in the life of a person, in history, etc., because of its particular characteristics: a period of illness; a period of great profitability for a company; a period of social unrest in Germany.
- permonosulfuric acid — persulfuric acid (def 1).
- polymorphic function — a function in a computer program that can deal with a number of different types of data
- probability function — the function the values of which are probabilities of the distinct outcomes of a discrete random variable
- proof of the pudding — the true value or quality of something, as seen when it is experienced, tried, or put to use: The proof of the pudding for a business is what customers say about it.
- quantum field theory — any theory in which fields are treated by the methods of quantum mechanics; each field can then be regarded as consisting of particles of a particular kind, which may be created and annihilated.
- queen of the prairie — a tall plant, Filipendula rubra, of the rose family, having branching clusters of pink flowers, growing in meadows and prairies.
- recuperative furnace — a furnace having its incoming air heated by exhaust gases, the passage of air and gases through the furnace being always in the same direction.
- recursive definition — a definition consisting of a set of rules such that by repeated application of the rules the meaning of the definiendum is uniquely determined in terms of ideas that are already familiar.