20-letter words containing a, d, o, g, s
- great-great-grandson — the grandson of a grandchild
- greatest lower bound — a lower bound that is greater than or equal to all the lower bounds of a given set: 1 is the greatest lower bound of the set consisting of 1, 2, 3. Abbreviation: glb.
- green monkey disease — Marburg disease.
- grievous bodily harm — law: serious injury
- guarded horn clauses — (language) (GHC) A parallel dialect of Prolog by K. Ueda in which each clause has a guard. GHC is similar to Parlog. When several clauses match a goal, their guards are evaluated in parallel and the first clause whose guard is found to be true is used and others are rejected. It uses committed-choice nondeterminism. See also FGHC, KL1.
- guided visualization — a relaxation technique in which words, sounds, etc., are used to evoke positive mental images, feelings, and thoughts.
- hold one's head high — to conduct oneself in a proud and confident manner
- huntington's disease — a hereditary disease of the central nervous system characterized by brain deterioration and loss of control over voluntary movements, the symptoms usually appearing in the fourth decade of life.
- industrial espionage — the stealing of technological or commercial research data, blueprints, plans, etc., as by a person in the hire of a competing company.
- industrial sociology — the sociological study of social relationships and social structures in business settings.
- into/in cold storage — If you put an idea or plan into cold storage or in cold storage, you delay it for a while rather than acting on it as you originally intended.
- intravenous drug use — the injection of drugs intravenously
- japanese pagoda tree — pagoda tree.
- judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
- laboratory diagnosis — scientific analysis of a disease
- labour-saving device — a machine, gadget, etc, that reduces (human) effort, hard work or labour
- 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
- laugh one's head off — Phrases such as laugh your head off and scream your head off can be used to emphasize that someone is laughing or screaming a lot or very loudly.
- 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
- 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.
- lou gehrig's disease — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
- 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.
- margaret of scotland — Saint. 1045–93, queen consort of Malcolm III of Scotland. Her piety and benefactions to the church led to her canonization (1250). Feast days: June 10, Nov 16
- megabytes per second — (unit) (MBps, MB/s) Millions of bytes per second. A unit of data rate. 1 MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes per second (not 1,048,576).
- monosodium glutamate — a white, crystalline, water-soluble powder, C 5 H 8 NNaO 4 ⋅H 2 O, used to intensify the flavor of foods.
- nostalgie de la boue — a desire for or attraction to crudity, vulgarity, depravity, etc.
- operating conditions — Operating conditions are a set of conditions for operating a particular system or process.
- physiologic jaundice — a transitory jaundice that affects some infants for the first few days after birth.
- portuguese water dog — one of a breed of medium-sized dogs originally developed to assist Portuguese fishermen and having a profuse black or brown coat with or without white markings and webbed feet.
- postgraduate student — a student who has obtained a degree from a university, etc, and is pursuing studies for a more advanced qualification
- pound cost averaging — a method of accumulating capital by investing a fixed sum in a particular security at regular intervals, in order to achieve an average purchase price below the arithmetic average of the market prices on the purchase dates
- pseudo-psychological — of or relating to psychology.
- quantum bogodynamics — /kwon'tm boh"goh-di:-nam"iks/ A theory that characterises the universe in terms of bogon sources (such as politicians, used-car salesmen, TV evangelists, and suits in general), bogon sinks (such as taxpayers and computers), and bogosity potential fields. Bogon absorption causes human beings to behave mindlessly and machines to fail (and may also cause both to emit secondary bogons); however, the precise mechanics of bogon-computron interaction are not yet understood. Quantum bogodynamics is most often invoked to explain the sharp increase in hardware and software failures in the presence of suits; the latter emit bogons, which the former absorb.
- rose-colored glasses — a cheerful or optimistic view of things, usually without valid basis: He saw life through rose-colored glasses.
- rough-winged swallow — either of two New World swallows of the genus Stelgidopteryx, having outer primary feathers with small barblike hooks on the margins.
- schrodinger equation — the wave equation of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. Also called Schrödinger wave equation. Compare wave equation (def 2).
- see the light of day — come into being
- sell a bill of goods — a quantity or consignment of salable items, as an order, shipment, etc.
- send someone packing — to dismiss or get rid of (someone) peremptorily
- shoulder-length hair — hair that reaches a person's shoulders
- software methodology — (programming) The study of how to navigate through each phase of the software process model (determining data, control, or uses hierarchies, partitioning functions, and allocating requirements) and how to represent phase products (structure charts, stimulus-response threads, and state transition diagrams).
- sound-and-light show — a nighttime spectacle or performance, at which a building, historic site, etc., is illuminated and the historic significance is imparted to spectators by means of narration, sound effects, and music.
- stained glass window — a window made of coloured glass, often showing religious pictures and usually seen in churches
- sunday-go-to-meeting — most presentable; best: Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.
- synchronized skating — the art or sport of teams of up to twenty skaters holding onto each other and moving in patterns in time to music
- tetrahydrogestrinone — a synthetic anabolic steroid. Formula: C21H28O2
- the founding fathers — any of the men who were members of the U.S. Constituional Convention of 1787
- the thousand guineas — an annual horse race, restricted to fillies, run at Newmarket since 1814
- to be at loggerheads — to be in conflict