23-letter words containing et
- set one's teeth on edge — (in most vertebrates) one of the hard bodies or processes usually attached in a row to each jaw, serving for the prehension and mastication of food, as weapons of attack or defense, etc., and in mammals typically composed chiefly of dentin surrounding a sensitive pulp and covered on the crown with enamel.
- settle (one's) accounts — To settle accounts with an enemy or opponent means to bring your fight or quarrel to an end by defeating them.
- slip between the cracks — to break without complete separation of parts; become fissured: The plate cracked when I dropped it, but it was still usable.
- soviet of nationalities — the legislature of the former Soviet Union and its successor states, consisting of an upper house (Soviet of the Union or Council of the Union) whose delegates are elected on the basis of population, and a lower house (Soviet of Nationalities or Council of Nationalities) whose delegates are elected to represent the various nationalities.
- spigot and socket joint — a joint between two pipes using male and female parts
- spirit of nitrous ether — ethyl nitrite spirit.
- stand on one's own feet — a plural of foot.
- standard widget toolkit — (graphics, programming, standard) (SWT) The Eclipse Foundation's framework for developing graphical user interfaces in Java. SWT is written in explicitly standard Java but uses the Java Native Interface to talk to a platform-native GUI library. SWT is the third major attempt to give Java a decent GUI framework, following AWT and Swing. Of the three, SWT is the most consistent with the native GUIs but its programming model is hard to port to non-Windows platforms.
- sub specie aeternitatis — from the standpoint of eternity; from a universal perspective
- the metropolitan police — the police organization that is responsible for Greater London, excluding the City of London
- the numbers game/racket — If you refer to the numbers game, the numbers racket, or the numbers, you are referring to an illegal lottery or illegal betting.
- throw down the gauntlet — a medieval glove, as of mail or plate, worn by a knight in armor to protect the hand.
- to get ahold of oneself — to force oneself to become calm and sensible after a shock or in a difficult situation
- to get the better of sb — If a feeling such as jealousy, curiosity, or anger gets the better of you, it becomes too strong for you to hide or control.
- to get/put sb's back up — If someone or something puts your back up or gets your back up, they annoy you.
- to hell in a handbasket — to one's doom
- to meet someone halfway — If you meet someone halfway, you accept some of the points they are making so that you can come to an agreement with them.
- track and field athlete — a sportsperson who participates in events that involve running, sprinting, throwing, jumping and walking
- united methodist church — the largest denomination of the Methodist church in the U.S., formed in 1939 from the merger of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Methodist Protestant Church, with the addition in 1968 of the Evangelical United Brethren.
- universal character set — (character, standard) (UCS, ISO/IEC 10646) A 1993 ISO and IEC standard character set, also known as "Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set". UCS comes in a 16-bit variant called UCS-2 and a 32-bit variant called UCS-4, which is composed of 16-bit UCS-2 "planes". So far only one 16-bit plane has been defined, which is known as the Basic Multilingual Plane. The implementation of UCS is still in its infancy, though some moves, such as the Java language defining a character to be 16 bits, are suggestive.
- veterans administration — the federal agency charged with administering benefits provided by law for veterans of the armed forces. Abbreviation: VA, V.A.
- video cassette recorder — See VCR.
- virtual private network — (networking, security) (VPN) The use of encryption in the lower protocol layers to provide a secure connection through an otherwise insecure network, typically the Internet. VPNs are generally cheaper than real private networks using private lines but rely on having the same encryption system at both ends. The encryption may be performed by firewall software or possibly by routers. Link-level (layer 2 and 3) encryption provides extra protection by encrypting all of each datagram except the link-level information. This prevents a listener from obtaining information about network structure. While link-level encryption prevents traffic analysis (a form of attack), it must encrypt/decrypt on every hop and every path. Protocol-level encryption (layer 3 and 4) encryption encrypts protocol data but leaves protocol and link headers clear. While protocol-level encryption requires you to encrypt/decrypt data only once, and it encrypts/decrypts only those sessions that need it, headers are sent as clear text, allowing traffic analysis. Application (layer 5 up) encryption is based on a particular application and requires that the application be modified to incorporate encryption.
- volumetric displacement — the volume of air per revolution that passes through a mechanical pump when the pressure at the intake and the exhaust is the same as that of the atmosphere
- whet someone's appetite — If someone or something whets your appetite for a particular thing, they increase your desire to have it or know about it, especially by giving you an idea of what it is like.