0%

18-letter words containing f, i, t

  • bird's-nest fungus — any fungus of the family Nidulariaceae, having a nestlike spore-producing body containing egglike spore-filled structures
  • birds of a feather — If you refer to two people as birds of a feather, you mean that they have the same interests or are very similar.
  • blackwater rafting — the sport of riding through underground caves on a large rubber tube
  • blanche of castile — ?1188–1252, queen consort (1223–26) of Louis VIII of France, born in Spain. The mother of Louis IX, she acted as regent during his minority (1226–36) and his absence on a crusade (1248–52)
  • bloggs family, the — An imaginary family consisting of Fred and Mary Bloggs and their children. Used as a standard example in knowledge representation to show the difference between extensional and intensional objects. For example, every occurrence of "Fred Bloggs" is the same unique person, whereas occurrences of "person" may refer to different people. Members of the Bloggs family have been known to pop up in bizarre places such as the DEC Telephone Directory. Compare Mbogo, Dr. Fred.
  • board of directors — A company's board of directors is the group of people elected by its shareholders to manage the company.
  • board of education — a group or agency with responsibility for education
  • board of elections — a bipartisan board appointed usually by local authorities and charged with control of elections and voting procedure.
  • bone of contention — If a particular matter or issue is a bone of contention, it is the subject of a disagreement or argument.
  • bottom-of-the-line — being the cheapest item of its kind made by a manufacturer; produced as inexpensively as possible (opposed to top-of-the-line): bottom-of-the-line merchandise that has no warranty.
  • branch to fishkill — (IBM: from the location of one of the corporation's facilities) Any unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. See jump off into never-never land, hyperspace.
  • branching fraction — (in branching) the proportion of the disintegrating nuclei that follow a particular branch to the total number of disintegrating nuclides
  • breach of security — an act that violates a country, area, or building's security measures
  • built-in self test — (BIST) The technique of designing circuits with additional logic which can be used to test proper operation of the primary (functional) logic.
  • by fits and starts — spasmodically; without concerted effort
  • california current — a cold current originating in the northern part of the Pacific Ocean, flowing SE along the coast of W North America.
  • campaign furniture — furniture, as chests or desks, having metal hinges on the corners and handles on the sides.
  • cap of maintenance — a ceremonial cap or hat worn or carried as a symbol of office, rank, etc
  • cartilaginous fish — any fish of the class Chondrichthyes, including the sharks, skates, and rays, having a skeleton composed entirely of cartilage
  • cash-for-questions — of, involved in, or relating to a scandal in which some MPs were accused of accepting bribes to ask particular questions in Parliament
  • catherine of siena — Saint. 1347–80, Italian mystic and ascetic; patron saint of the Dominican order. Feast day: April 29
  • centrifugal clutch — an automatic clutch in which the friction surfaces are engaged by weighted levers acting under centrifugal force at a certain speed of rotation
  • certification mark — a mark that certifies the origin, material, quality, mode of manufacture, accuracy, or other characteristic of a product or service: “UL” is a certification mark for appliances meeting the safety standards of Underwriters Laboratories, Inc.
  • check verification — Check verification is a system that checks national databases of information about individuals to make sure that checks will be honored and fraud is not being committed.
  • chord of the sixth — sixth chord.
  • christian reformed — of or relating to a Protestant denomination (Christian Reformed Church) organized in the U.S. in 1857 by groups that had seceded from the Dutch Reformed Church.
  • classified section — the part of a publication that contains classified advertising
  • coffee-table music — unadventurous music
  • college of justice — the official name for the Scottish Court of Session; the supreme court of Scotland
  • comb-footed spider — any of numerous spiders constituting the family Theridiidae, having a comblike row of bristles on the tarsi of the hind legs.
  • combustion furnace — a furnace used in the laboratory to carry out elemental analysis of organic compounds
  • committed facility — an agreement by a bank to provide a customer with funds up to a specified limit at a specified rate of interest
  • compassion fatigue — the inability to react sympathetically to a crisis, disaster, etc, because of overexposure to previous crises, disasters, etc
  • composite function — a function obtained from two given functions, where the range of one function is contained in the domain of the second function, by assigning to an element in the domain of the first function that element in the range of the second function whose inverse image is the image of the element.
  • conditioned reflex — a reflex in which the response (e.g., secretion of saliva in a dog) is occasioned by a secondary stimulus (e.g., the ringing of a bell) repeatedly associated with the primary stimulus (e.g., the sight of meat)
  • configuration item — (jargon)   Hardware or software, or an aggregate of both, which is designated by the project configuration manager (or contracting agency) for configuration management.
  • constructive proof — (mathematics)   A proof that something exists that provides an example or a method for actually constructing it. For example, for any pair of finite real numbers n < 0 and p > 0, there exists a real number 0 < k < 1 such that f(k) = (1-k)*n + k*p = 0. A constructive proof would proceed by rearranging the above to derive an equation for k: k = 1/(1-n/p) From this and the constraints on n and p, we can show that 0 < k < 1. A few mathematicians actually reject *all* non-constructive arguments as invalid; this means, for instance, that the law of the excluded middle (either P or not-P must hold, whatever P is) has to go; this makes proof by contradiction invalid. See intuitionistic logic. Constructive proofs are popular in theoretical computer science, both because computer scientists are less given to abstraction than mathematicians and because intuitionistic logic turns out to be an appropriate theoretical treatment of the foundations of computer science.
  • continued fraction — a number plus a fraction whose denominator contains a number and a fraction whose denominator contains a number and a fraction, and so on
  • contract furniture — furniture designed and manufactured for commercial installation, as in offices, waiting rooms, or lobbies.
  • cooking facilities — equipment necessary for cooking
  • counterreformation — a reform movement to oppose a previous one
  • creeping featurism — (jargon)   /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ (Or "feature creep") A systematic tendency to load more chrome and features onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed. "The main problem with BSD Unix has always been creeping featurism." More generally, creeping featurism is the tendency for anything to become more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had this feature too". The result is usually a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone, and then another, and another, .... When creeping featurism gets out of hand, it's like a cancer. Usually this term is used to describe computer programs, but it could also be said of the federal government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A similar phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious redesigns; see second-system effect. See also creeping elegance.
  • crocodile-infested — full of crocodiles
  • crude oil fraction — A crude oil fraction is a component of crude oil, which has its own particular molecular composition, weight, and boiling point.
  • cultural diffusion — act of diffusing; state of being diffused.
  • current efficiency — the ratio of the actual mass of a substance liberated from an electrolyte by the passage of current to the theoretical mass liberated according to Faraday's law
  • curvature of field — a monochromatic aberration of a lens or other optical system in which the focal surface is curved, the refracted image of an object oriented perpendicular to the axis of the lens lying on a curved surface rather than in a plane perpendicular to the axis.
  • cycle of indiction — indiction (def 3).
  • cycle-of-indiction — a proclamation made every 15 years in the later Roman Empire, fixing the valuation of property to be used as a basis for taxation.
  • data flow analysis — (programming)   A process to discover the dependencies between different data items manipulated by a program. The order of execution in a data driven language is determined solely by the data dependencies. For example, given the equations 1. X = A + B 2. B = 2 + 2 3. A = 3 + 4 a data-flow analysis would find that 2 and 3 must be evaluated before 1. Since there are no data dependencies between 2 and 3, they may be evaluated in any order, including in parallel. This technique is implemented in hardware in some pipelined processors with multiple functional units. It allows instructions to be executed as soon as their inputs are available, independent of the original program order.
Was this page helpful?
Yes No
Thank you for your feedback! Tell your friends about this page
Tell us why?