20-letter words containing le
- electromagnetic unit — any unit that belongs to a system of electrical cgs units in which the magnetic constant is given the value of unity and is taken as a pure number
- electromagnetic wave — a wave of energy propagated in an electromagnetic field
- electromotive series — a series of the metals, together with hydrogen, ranged in the order of their electrode potentials
- electronic footprint — data that identifies a computer that has connected to a particular website
- electronic signature — electronic proof of a person's identity
- electrophysiological — Of or pertaining to electrophysiology.
- electroshock therapy — a form of shock therapy in which electric current is applied to the brain
- elementary education — the first six to eight years of a child's education
- elephant in the room — an obvious truth deliberately ignored by all parties in a situation
- eleusinian mysteries — a mystical religious festival, held in September at Eleusis in classical times, in which initiates celebrated Persephone, Demeter, and Dionysus
- enabling legislation — legislation conferring certain specified powers on a person or organization
- environment variable — (programming, operating system) A variable that is bound in the current environment. When evaluating an expression in some environment, the evaluation of a variable consists of looking up its name in the environment and substituting its value. Most programming languages have some concept of an environment but in Unix shell scripts it has a specific meaning slightly different from other contexts. In shell scripts, environment variables are one kind of shell variable. They differ from local variables and command line arguments in that they are inheritted by a child process. Examples are the PATH variable that tells the shell the file system paths to search to find command executables and the TZ variable which contains the local time zone. The variable called "SHELL" specifies the type of shell being used. These variables are used by commands or shell scripts to discover things about the environment they are operating in. Environment variables can be changed or created by the user or a program. To see a list of environment variables type "setenv" at the csh or tcsh prompt or "set" at the sh, bash, jsh or ksh prompt. In other programming languages, e.g. functional programming languages, the environment is extended with new bindings when a function's parameters are bound to its actual arguments or when new variables are declared. In a block-structured procedural language, the environment usually consists of a linked list of activation records.
- equivalence relation — (mathematics) A relation R on a set including elements a, b, c, which is reflexive (a R a), symmetric (a R b => b R a) and transitive (a R b R c => a R c). An equivalence relation defines an equivalence class. See also partial equivalence relation.
- equivalent air speed — the speed at sea level that would produce the same Pitot-static tube reading as that measured at altitude
- essential complexity — (programming) A measure of the "structuredness" of a program.
- exercise, left as an — Used to complete a proof in technical books when one doesn't mind a handwave, or to avoid one entirely. The complete phrase is: "The proof [or "the rest"] is left as an exercise for the reader." This comment *has* occasionally been attached to unsolved research problems by authors possessed of either an evil sense of humour or a vast faith in the capabilities of their audiences.
- explicit parallelism — A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which allows or forces the programmer to annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks. This is obviously more work for the programmer than a system with implicit parallelism (where the system decides automatically which parts to run in parallel) but may allow higher performance.
- feast of tabernacles — Sukkoth.
- file descriptor leak — (programming) (Or "fd leak" /F D leek/) A kind of programming bug analogous to a core leak, in which a program fails to close file descriptors ("fd"s) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually runs out of them. See leak.
- financial controller — a senior executive in usually commercial organization who is in charge of financial affairs and oversees such things as the preparation of budgets and accounts
- first world problems — If you say that someone has First World problems, you mean that their problems are not really very important.
- five-elements school — Yin-Yang School.
- flat-plate collector — a type of solar collector consisting of a series of flat glass or plastic plates with black metal surfaces that absorb solar energy.
- florence nightingale — Florence ("the Lady with the Lamp") 1820–1910, English nurse: reformer of hospital conditions and procedures; reorganizer of nurse's training programs.
- fontainebleau school — a group of artists, many of them Italian and Flemish, who worked on the decorations of the palace of Fontainebleau in the 16th century.
- for sb's delectation — If you do something for someone's delectation, you do it to give them enjoyment or pleasure.
- 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
- friedrich max müller — Friedrich Max [free-drik maks;; German free-drikh mahks] /ˈfri drɪk mæks;; German ˈfri drɪx mɑks/ (Show IPA), 1823–1900, English Sanskrit scholar and philologist born in Germany.
- full to the gunwales — completely full; full to overflowing
- fundamental particle — elementary particle.
- gentleman of fortune — an adventurer.
- gentleman-in-waiting — a man who comes from a family of high social standing and who is attached to a royal household or to the household of a person of high rank
- 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 one's hackles up — to become tense with anger; bristle
- girdle-tailed lizard — any African lizard of the family Cordylidae, having a spiny tail used in defense.
- grand right and left — a figure called in square dancing in which partners face each other, forming a small circle, and then advance around the circle by extending alternating right and left hands to pull past each new person until they reach their partners again.
- graphics accelerator — (graphics, hardware) Hardware (often an extra circuit board) to perform tasks such as plotting lines and surfaces in two or three dimensions, filling, shading and hidden line removal.
- great-circle sailing — sailing between two points more or less according to an arc of a great circle, in practice almost always using a series of rhumb lines of different bearings to approximate the arc, whose own bearing changes constantly unless it coincides with a meridian or the equator.
- greek-letter society — any student fraternity or sorority in a US university or college, usually using Greek letters in their title
- greenwich hour angle — hour angle measured from the meridian of Greenwich, England.
- grey-crowned babbler — an insect-eating Australian bird, Pomatostomus temporalis of the family Timaliidae
- hard gelatin capsule — A hard gelatin capsule is a type of capsule that is usually used to contain medicine in the form of dry powder or very small pellets.
- harmonic minor scale — minor scale (def 1).
- heston and isleworth — a former borough, now part of Hounslow, in SE England, near London.
- high-energy particle — Physics
- highbush huckleberry — black huckleberry.
- holy water sprinkler — morning star (def 2).
- honeysuckle ornament — anthemion.
- hypercholesterolemia — the presence of an excessive amount of cholesterol in the blood.
- hypercholesterolemic — (pathology) Of, pertaining to, or having hypercholesterolemia.