19-letter words containing fi
- first-past-the-post — A first-past-the-post system for choosing members of parliament or other representatives is one in which the candidate who gets most votes wins.
- first-sale doctrine — a legal principle allowing the purchaser of a lawfully made copy of a copyright-protected work to sell or give away that copy without permission but not to reproduce it.
- five o'clock shadow — the rather dark stubble that appears on a man's face some hours after shaving, typically in the late afternoon if he shaved in the morning.
- five-o'clock shadow — the rather dark stubble that appears on a man's face some hours after shaving, typically in the late afternoon if he shaved in the morning.
- fix someone's wagon — any of various kinds of four-wheeled vehicles designed to be pulled or having its own motor and ranging from a child's toy to a commercial vehicle for the transport of heavy loads, delivery, etc.
- fixed cost contract — a contract in which the costs do not vary
- fixed exchange rate — finance: set rate of exchange
- fixed-rate mortgage — a home mortgage for which equal monthly payments of interest and principal are paid over the life of the loan, usually for a term of 30 years.
- fixed-term contract — a contract for a particular and fixed period
- fixed-wing aircraft — a heavier-than-air aircraft capable of flight whose lift is generated not by wing motion relative to the aircraft, but by forward motion through the air
- fortification agate — an agate, used as a gem, having polygonal banding such that it suggests the plan of a bastion.
- front-end financing — money or costs required or incurred in advance of a project in order to get it under way
- full-wave rectifier — a rectifier that transmits both halves of a cycle of alternating current as a direct current.
- general post office — (in the U.S. postal system) the main post office of a city, county, etc., that also has branch post offices. Abbreviation: G.P.O., GPO.
- genetic fingerprint — DNA fingerprinting.
- giovanni da fiesole — Giovanni da [Italian jaw-vahn-nee dah] /Italian dʒɔˈvɑn ni dɑ/ (Show IPA), Angelico, Fra.
- give a person a fit — to surprise a person in an outrageous manner
- gravitational field — the attractive effect, considered as extending throughout space, of matter on other matter.
- gross profit margin — A gross profit margin is a measure of the profitability of a company, that is calculated by dividing gross profit by net sales.
- guerrilla financing — the use of unconventional and marginally legal means to capitalize enterprises
- half wave rectifier — A half wave rectifier removes the negative component of an alternating signal leaving only the positive part.
- half-wave rectifier — a rectifier that changes only one half of a cycle of alternating current into a pulsating, direct current.
- halt and catch fire — (humour, processor) (HCF) Any of several undocumented and semi-mythical machine instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back as the IBM 360. The Motorola 6800 microprocessor was the first for which an HCF opcode became widely known. This instruction caused the processor to read every memory location sequentially until reset.
- hang five (or ten) — to ride a surfboard with the toes of one (or both) feet draped over the front edge of the board
- hatfield-mccoy feud — a blood feud between two mountain clans on the West Virginia–Kentucky border, the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky, that grew out of their being on opposite sides during the Civil War and was especially violent during 1880–90.
- huffing and puffing — empty threats or objections; bluster
- hyperfine structure — the splitting of the lines of an atomic spectrum, produced by the angular momentum of the nucleus of the atom.
- identification card — a card giving identifying data about a person, as full name, address, age, and color of hair and eyes, and often containing a photograph: for use as identification at a place of employment, school, club, etc.
- identification mark — barcode or serial number
- immigration officer — official administrating incoming foreigners
- in definite pronoun — a pronoun, as English some, any, somebody, that leaves unspecified the identity of its referent.
- indefinite integral — a representation, usually in symbolic form, of any function whose derivative is a given function.
- information officer — someone whose job is to give information to people
- inglenook fireplace — a large fireplace with a space on either side
- intelligence office — intelligence agency.
- interactive fiction — an adventure or mystery story, usually presented as a video game or book, in which the player or reader is given choices as to how the storyline is to develop or the mystery is to be solved.
- interesterification — transesterification.
- jacques montgolfier — Jacques Étienne [zhahk ey-tyen] /ʒɑk eɪˈtyɛn/ (Show IPA), 1745–99, and his brother Joseph Michel [zhaw-zef mee-shel] /ʒɔˈzɛf miˈʃɛl/ (Show IPA) 1740–1810, French aeronauts: inventors of the first practical balloon 1783.
- landrum-griffin act — an act of Congress (1959) outlawing secondary boycotts, requiring public disclosure of the financial records of unions, and guaranteeing the use of secret ballots in union voting.
- lay one's finger on — to indicate, identify, or locate accurately
- leading coefficient — the coefficient of the term of highest degree in a given polynomial. 5 is the leading coefficient in 5 x 3 + 3 x 2 − 2 x + 1.
- left-luggage office — a checkroom for baggage.
- level playing field — a state of equality; an equal opportunity.
- love at first sight — instant romantic attraction to sb
- luminous efficiency — the perceived brightness of light as a ratio of the total luminous flux to total radiant flux of the source; a measure of brightness obtained by dividing the source's luminous flux by the consumption of its energy.
- lyon office of arms — Heralds' Office.
- medical certificate — a document stating the result of a satisfactory medical examination
- menominee whitefish — round whitefish.
- neats vs. scruffies — (artificial intelligence, jargon) The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in artificial intelligence research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; "neats" tend to try to build systems that "reason" in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while "scruffies" profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favour looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture "common sense" of living intelligences.
- network file system — (networking, operating system) (NFS) A protocol developed by Sun Microsystems, and defined in RFC 1094, which allows a computer to access files over a network as if they were on its local disks. This protocol has been incorporated in products by more than two hundred companies, and is now a de facto standard. NFS is implemented using a connectionless protocol (UDP) in order to make it stateless. See Nightmare File System, WebNFS.