20-letter words containing al
- financial instrument — A financial instrument is a document or contract that can be traded in a market, that represents an asset to one party and a liability or equity to the other.
- financial management — supervision and handling of the financial affairs of an organization
- financial statements — Financial statements are all of the reports that show how a company is performing for a certain period.
- five-a-side football — a version of soccer with five players in each team
- fixed penalty (fine) — a fine of a fixed amount of money for a particular offence
- florence nightingale — Florence ("the Lady with the Lamp") 1820–1910, English nurse: reformer of hospital conditions and procedures; reorganizer of nurse's training programs.
- football hooliganism — the actions or behaviour of a football hooligan
- for all one is worth — good or important enough to justify (what is specified): advice worth taking; a place worth visiting.
- force-field analysis — a decision-making technique, often presented graphically, that identifies all the positive and negative forces impinging on a problem
- fore-topgallant mast — the spar or section of a spar forming the topgallant portion of a foremast on a ship.
- forty-ninth parallel — an informal name for the Canadian border with the USA, which is in part delineated by the parallel line of latitude at 49°N
- fourth international — a loose federation of small groups of radical socialists formed in 1936 under the leadership of Leon Trotsky and hostile to the Soviet Union. Compare international (def 6).
- frankfurt horizontal — Craniometry. the plane established when right and left poria and left orbitale are in the same horizontal plane.
- freefall parachuting — a variety of parachuting in which the jumper manoeuvres in free fall before opening the parachute
- frontenac et palluau — Comte de (Louis de Buade) 1620?–98, French governor of New France 1672–82, 1689–98.
- full to the gunwales — completely full; full to overflowing
- fundamental constant — a physical constant, such as the gravitational constant or speed of light, that plays a fundamental role in physics and chemistry and usually has an accurately known value
- fundamental particle — elementary particle.
- fundamental research — research carried out to deepen understanding of the fundamental or basic principles of something
- fundamental sequence — an infinite sequence, x 1 , x 2 , …, whose terms are points in Ek, in which there exists a point y such that the limit as n goes to infinity of xn = y if and only if for every ε>0, there exists a number N such that i > N and j > N implies | xi − xj |< ε. Also called Cauchy sequence, convergent sequence. Compare complete (def 10b).
- general headquarters — the headquarters of the commanding officer of a large military force. Abbreviation: GHQ, G.H.Q.
- general postal union — former name of Universal Postal Union. Abbreviation: GPU.
- general practitioner — a medical practitioner whose practice is not limited to any specific branch of medicine or class of diseases. Abbreviation: G.P.
- general public virus — (software, legal) A pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or application programs incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same terms as GNU code. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft "infects" software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code.
- genetically modified — biologically altered
- geological timescale — any division of geological time into chronological units, whether relative (with units in the correct temporal sequence) or absolute (with numerical ages attached)
- get a real computer! — (jargon) A typical hacker response to news that somebody is having trouble getting work done on a toy system or bitty box. The threshold for "real computer" rises with time. As of mid-1993 it meant multi-tasking, with a hard disk, and an address space bigger than 16 megabytes. At this time, according to GLS, computers with character-only displays were verging on "unreal". In 2001, a real computer has a one gigahertz processor, 128 MB of RAM, 20 GB of hard disk, and runs Linux.
- get away from it all — If you get away from it all, you have a holiday in a place that is very different from where you normally live and work.
- gingival hyperplasia — Gingival hyperplasia is abnormal enlargement of the gums.
- gorno-altai republic — a constituent republic of S Russia: mountainous, rising over 4350 m (14 500 ft) in the Altai Mountains of the south. Capital: Gorno-Altaisk. Pop: 202 900 (2002). Area: 92 600 sq km (35 740 sq miles)
- governador valadares — a city in E Brazil.
- gravimetric analysis — analysis by weight.
- gravitational radius — Schwarzschild radius.
- guided visualization — a relaxation technique in which words, sounds, etc., are used to evoke positive mental images, feelings, and thoughts.
- hampton court palace — a royal palace in Hampton, London, built in 1515 by Cardinal Wolsey
- harmonic minor scale — minor scale (def 1).
- have an itching palm — to desire money greedily
- health questionnaire — A health questionnaire is a list of questions about someone's health issued by underwriters before accepting a person as a risk.
- hexadecimal notation — a number system having a base 16; the symbols for the numbers 0–9 are the same as those used in the decimal system, and the numbers 10–15 are usually represented by the letters A–F. The system is used as a convenient way of representing the internal binary code of a computer
- hierarchical routing — The complex problem of routing on large networks can be simplified by breaking a network into a hierarchy of smaller networks, where each level is responsible for its own routing. The Internet has, basically, three levels: the backbones, the mid-levels, and the stub networks. The backbones know how to route between the mid-levels, the mid-levels know how to route between the sites, and each site (being an autonomous system) knows how to route internally. See also Exterior Gateway Protocol, Interior Gateway Protocol, transit network.
- himalayan guinea pig — a variety of short-haired guinea pig with markings on its nose, ears, and feet
- hindu-arabic numeral — Arabic numeral.
- historical sociology — the sociological study of the origins and development of societies and of other social phenomena that seeks underlying laws and principles.
- horizontal microcode — (processor) Microcode using horizontal encoding.
- horizontal scan rate — (hardware) (HSR) The measure of how many scan lines of pixels a monitor can display in one second, expressed in kHz (generally somewhere between 20 and 100 kHz). The HSR is controlled by the horizontal sync signal generated by the video controller, but is limited by the speed with which the monitor can scan the electron beam horizontally across the screen and then return it to the beginning of the next line.
- horizontally opposed — A horizontally opposed engine has the cylinders set horizontally at either side of the crankshaft.
- hospitality industry — the hotel and accommodation industry
- ideal of pure reason — God, seen as an idea of pure reason unifying the personal soul with the cosmos.
- implicit parallelism — (parallel) A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which decides automatically which parts to run in parallel. The best way of providing implicit parallelism is still (1995) an active research topic. The problem is to generate the right number of parallel tasks of the right size (or "granularity"). Too many tasks and the system gets bogged down in house-keeping, or memory for waiting tasks runs out, too few tasks and processors are left idle. The best performance is usually achieved with explicit parallelism where the programmer can annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks.
- in the last analysis — after everything has been given due consideration