19-letter words containing a, c, s, e
- karachai-cherkessia — a constituent republic of W Russia, on the N side of the Caucasus Mountains. Capital: Cherkessk. Pop: 439 700 (2002). Area: 14 100 sq km (5440 sq miles)
- keep one's distance — the extent or amount of space between two things, points, lines, etc.
- keep up appearances — If you keep up appearances, you try to behave and dress in a way that people expect of you, even if you can no longer afford it.
- kinematic viscosity — the coefficient of viscosity of a fluid divided by the density, usually measured in stokes.
- king charles's head — a fixed idea; personal obsession
- king's remembrancer — (in Great Britain) a judiciary official who collects debts owed to the king.
- knock someone bandy — to amaze or astound
- label switched path — (networking) (LSP) The specific path through a network that a datagram follows, based on its MPLS labels.
- landscape architect — A landscape architect is the same as a landscape gardener.
- landscape gardening — the art or trade of designing or rearranging large gardens, estates, etc.
- languages of choice — C and Lisp. Nearly every hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities. There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with Fortran, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as Real Programmers, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of Mel"). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but HLL implementation, glue, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. Fortran occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming. Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and Ada, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or other traditional card walloper languages as a total and unmitigated loss.
- league championship — the competition to become league champions
- lean over backwards — to make a special effort, esp in order to please
- least recently used — (operating systems) (LRU) A rule used in a paging system which selects a page to be paged out if it has been used (read or written) less recently than any other page. The same rule may also be used in a cache to select which cache entry to flush. This rule is based on temporal locality - the observation that, in general, the page (or cache entry) which has not been accessed for longest is least likely to be accessed in the near future.
- legislative council — the upper house of a bicameral legislature.
- leisure occupations — activities which you enjoy and which you perform in your free time
- liability insurance — insurance covering the insured against losses arising from injury or damage to another person or property.
- library of congress — one of the major library collections in the world, located in Washington, D.C., and functioning in some ways as the national library of the U.S. although not officially designated as such: established by Congress in 1800 for service to its members, but now also serving government agencies, other libraries, and the public.
- licensing agreement — an agreement that sets out the fees and terms of use for something available only under licence
- like a cheshire cat — If someone is grinning like a Cheshire cat or like the Cheshire cat, they are smiling very widely.
- lipopolysaccharides — Plural form of lipopolysaccharide.
- liquorice all-sorts — a brand of assorted sweets containing liquorice as well as coloured candy made of sugar, gelatine, and coconut
- logical consequence — the relation that obtains between the conclusion and the premises of a formally valid argument
- loss-of-containment — Loss-of-containment happens when a fluid which is usually contained somewhere escapes from that place.
- lyon office of arms — Heralds' Office.
- macaroni and cheese — pasta with cheese sauce
- machine instruction — (programming) The smallest element of a machine code program.
- machine translation — changing language of a text by computer
- maestro di cappella — a person in charge of an orchestra, esp a private one attached to the palace of a prince in Italy during the baroque period
- magnesium carbonate — a white powder, MgCO 3 , insoluble in water and alcohol, soluble in acids, used in dentifrices and cosmetics, in medicine as an antacid, and as a refractory material.
- magnetic hysteresis — hysteresis in a ferromagnetic material; the lag in the response of magnetic induction to changes of magnetic intensity.
- major seventh chord — a chord much used in modern music, esp jazz and pop, consisting of a major triad with an added major seventh above the root
- make oneself scarce — insufficient to satisfy the need or demand; not abundant: Meat and butter were scarce during the war.
- male chauvinist pig — male chauvinist.
- malicious falsehood — a lie told by someone who knows the lie is false or knows it will do harm to the person it is concerning
- malleable cast iron — white cast iron that has been malleablized.
- manchester autocode — (language, history) The predecessor of Mercury Autocode.
- manchester encoding — (communications, protocol) A method of transmitting bits which enables the receiver to easily synchronise with the sender. A simple way of signalling bits might be to transmit a high voltage for some period for a 1-bit and a low voltage for a 0 bit: Bits Sent: 1 1 0 0 Signal: High ___ Low |___ Time: -> . . . . . However, when several identical bits are sent in succession, this provides no information to the receiver about when each bit starts and stops. Manchester encoding splits each bit period into two, and ensures that there is always a transition between the signal levels in the middle of each bit. This allows the receiver to synchronise with the sender. In normal Manchester encoding, a 1-bit is transmitted with a high voltage in the first period, and a low voltage in the second, and vice verse for the 0 bit: Bits Sent: 1 1 0 0 Signal: High Low || |_| || Time: -> . ' . ' . ' . ' . In Differential Manchester encoding, a 1-bit is indicated by making the first half of the signal equal to the last half of the previous bit's signal and a 0-bit is indicated by making the first half of the signal opposite to the last half of the previous bit's signal. That is, a zero bit is indicated by a transition at the beginning of the bit. Like normal Manchester encoding, there is always a transition in the middle of the transmission of the bit. Differential Manchester Encoding Bits Sent: 1 1 0 0 Signal: High __ Low |_| || || Time: -> . ' . ' . ' . ' . With each bit period half as long, twice as much bandwidth is required when using either of the Manchester encoding schemes.
- manned space flight — space travel in vehicles with a human crew
- maraschino cherries — cherries in a syrup flavored with maraschino or, now usually, imitation maraschino
- mary wollstonecraft — Mary (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) 1759–97, English author and feminist (mother of Mary Shelley).
- means of production — resources: equipment, workers
- mechanical scanning — Electronics. a technique for varying the sector covered by a transmitting or receiving antenna by rotating it.
- megabits per second — (unit) (Mbps, Mb/s) Millions of bits per second. A unit of data rate. 1 Mb/s = 1,000,000 bits per second (not 1,048,576). E.g. Ethernet can carry 10 Mbps.
- melodic minor scale — minor scale (def 2).
- mendel's second law — the principle, originated by Gregor Mendel, stating that when two or more characteristics are inherited, individual hereditary factors assort independently during gamete production, giving different traits an equal opportunity of occurring together.
- meningoencephalitis — Inflammation of the membranes of the brain and the adjoining cerebral tissue.
- metaphosphoric acid — an acid, HPO 3 , derived from phosphorous pentoxide, and containing the smallest amount of water of the phosphoric acids.
- meter-candle-second — a unit of light-exposure equivalent to one lux for one second.
- miniature schnauzer — one of a German breed of sturdily built terriers resembling a smaller version of the standard schnauzer, having a wiry, pepper-and-salt, black, or black-and-silver coat, a rectangular head, bushy whiskers, and a docked tail, and originally developed as a farm dog but now raised primarily as a pet.