20-letter words containing a, c, o, i
- jerk someone's chain — to tease, mislead, or harass someone
- joint life insurance — life insurance covering two or more persons, the benefits of which are paid after the first person dies.
- judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
- justice of the peace — a local public officer, usually having jurisdiction to try and determine minor civil and criminal cases and to hold preliminary examinations of persons accused of more serious crimes, and having authority to administer oaths, solemnize marriages, etc.
- justifiable homicide — murder committed under extenuating circumstances
- keratoconjunctivitis — inflammation of the cornea and conjunctiva.
- kick over the traces — either of the two straps, ropes, or chains by which a carriage, wagon, or the like is drawn by a harnessed horse or other draft animal.
- labour-saving device — a machine, gadget, etc, that reduces (human) effort, hard work or labour
- lacto-ovo-vegetarian — Also called lactovarian [lak-tuh-vair-ee-uh n] /ˌlæk təˈvɛər i ən/ (Show IPA), ovolactarian, ovo-lacto-vegetarian. a vegetarian whose diet includes dairy products and eggs.
- land-office business — a lively, booming, expanding, or very profitable business.
- languedoc-roussillon — a region of S France, on the Gulf of Lions: consists of the departments of Lozère, Gard, Hérault, Aude, and Pyrénées-Orientales; mainly mountainous with a coastal plain
- last of the mohicans — a historical novel (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper.
- lavaliere microphone — a small microphone that hangs around the neck of a performer or speaker.
- law of contradiction — the law that a proposition cannot be both true and false or that a thing cannot both have and not have a given property.
- lead with one's chin — to act so imprudently as to invite disaster
- lieutenant commander — a commissioned officer ranking next below a commander and next above a lieutenant.
- life-support machine — A life-support machine is the equipment that is used to keep a person alive when they are very ill and cannot breathe without help.
- light the touchpaper — to do something that will cause much anger or excitement
- like a ton of bricks — (used esp of the manner of punishing or reprimanding someone) with great force; severely
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- logarithmic function — a function defined by y = log bx, especially when the base, b, is equal to e, the base of natural logarithms.
- logical construction — anything referred to by an incomplete symbol capable of contextual definition.
- logical link control — (networking) (LLC) The upper portion of the data link layer, as defined in IEEE 802.2. The LLC sublayer presents a uniform interface to the user of the data link service, usually the network layer. Beneath the LLC sublayer is the Media Access Control (MAC) sublayer.
- long island iced tea — a potent cocktail consisting of equal parts of, typically, five different distilled alcoholic liquors, usually vodka, gin, rum, tequila, and triple sec, with a small amount of mixer, usually cola
- longitude by account — the longitude of the position of a vessel as estimated by dead reckoning.
- longitudinal section — the representation of an object as it would appear if cut by the vertical plane passing through the longest axis of the object.
- lord high chancellor — the highest judicial officer of the British crown: law adviser of the ministry, keeper of the great seal, presiding officer in the House of Lords, etc.
- lunisolar precession — the principal component of the precession of the equinoxes, produced by the gravitational attraction of the sun and the moon on the equatorial bulge of the earth.
- macias nguema biyogo — a former name of Bioko.
- macular degeneration — degeneration of the central portion of the retina, resulting in a loss of sharp vision.
- madwoman of chaillot — a satirical comedy (1945) by Jean Giraudoux.
- magical mystery tour — something exciting and mysterious; esp an exploration of a new place where somebody being shown or taken around does not know where exactly they will be going
- magnetic coefficient — any of various factors affecting the sensitivity of a ship's magnetic compass as a result of its construction or environment.
- magnetic declination — variation (def 8).
- magnetic inclination — to plunge (something, as a cloth or sponge) temporarily into a liquid, so as to moisten it, dye it, or cause it to take up some of the liquid: He dipped the brush into the paint bucket.
- magneto-optical disk — (hardware, storage) (MO) A plastic or glass disk coated with a compound (often TbFeCo) with special optical, magnetic and thermal properties. The disk is read by bouncing a low-intensity laser off the disk. Originally the laser was infrared, but frequencies up to blue may be possible giving higher storage density. The polarisation of the reflected light depends on the polarity of the stored magnetic field. To write, a higher intensity laser heats the coating up to its Curie point, allowing its magnetisation to be altered in a way that is retained when it has cooled. Although optical, they appear as hard drives to the operating system and do not require a special filesystem (they can be formatted as FAT, HPFS, NTFS, etc.). The initial 5.25" MO drives, introduced at the end of the 1980s, were the size of a full-height 5.25" hard drive (like in IBM PC XT) and the disks looked like a CD-ROM enclosed in an old-style cartridge In 2006, a 3.5" drive has the size of 1.44 megabyte diskette drive with disks about the size of a regular 1.44MB floppy disc but twice the thickness.
- magnetohydrodynamics — the branch of physics that deals with the motion of electrically conductive fluids, especially plasmas, in magnetic fields. Abbreviation: MHD.
- magnification factor — the size of a magnified image of an object divided by the size of the object itself
- mail exchange record — (messaging) (MX Record) A DNS resource record type that says which SMTP server handles electronic mail for a particular domain. E.g. the MX record foo.co.uk. 1054 IN MX 10 mail.foo.co.uk. means that mail for an address like "[email protected]" should be sent to "mail.foo.co.uk". There can be several servers for a domain. The "10" is a priority - the server with the lowest number will be tried first.
- mail-order catalogue — a catalogue of goods you can buy from a particular company by mail order
- maintenance contract — a formal agreement between two parties which states that one party will keep a building, vehicle, machine, etc, belonging to the other party in good condition by regularly checking it and repairing it when necessary
- make a/no difference — If something makes a difference or makes a lot of difference, it affects you and helps you in what you are doing. If something makes no difference, it does not have any effect on what you are doing.
- malpighian corpuscle — Also called kidney corpuscle, Malpighian body. the structure at the beginning of a vertebrate nephron, consisting of a glomerulus and its surrounding Bowman's capsule.
- management committee — a committee of managers or senior members of an organization who are in charge of directing that organization
- manuel avila camacho — Manuel Ávila [mah-nwel ah-vee-lah] /mɑˈnwɛl ˈɑ viˌlɑ/ (Show IPA). Manuel Avila Camacho.
- master of ceremonies — a person who directs the entertainment at a party, dinner, nightclub, radio or television broadcast, or the like, acting as host and introducing the speakers or performers. Abbreviation: M.C., MC.
- material implication — equivalence (def 4a).
- media access control — (networking) (MAC) The lower sublayer of the OSI data link layer. The interface between a node's Logical Link Control and the network's physical layer. The MAC differs for various physical media. See also MAC Address, Ethernet, IEEE 802.3, token ring.
- medical practitioner — doctor
- megakaryocytopoiesis — (biology) The cellular development process that leads to platelet production.