20-letter words containing a, e, g, i, s
- 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.
- green monkey disease — Marburg disease.
- green mountain state — Vermont (used as a nickname).
- gregory of nazianzus — Saint. ?329–89 ad, Cappadocian theologian: bishop of Caesarea (370–79). Feast days: Jan 2, 25, and 30
- grievous bodily harm — law: serious injury
- group life insurance — a form of life insurance available to members of a group, typically employees of a company, under a master policy.
- group representation — representation in a governing body on the basis of interests rather than by geographical location.
- guided visualization — a relaxation technique in which words, sounds, etc., are used to evoke positive mental images, feelings, and thoughts.
- hang up one's spikes — to retire, as from a professional sport
- 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.
- hardware handshaking — (communications) A technique for regulating the flow of data across an interface by means of signals carried on separate wires. A common example is the RTS (Request to Send) and CTS (Clear to Send) signals on an EIA-232 serial line. The alternative, software handshaking, uses two special characters inserted into the data stream to carry the same information.
- harmonic progression — a series of numbers the reciprocals of which are in arithmetic progression.
- he's no oil painting — he is not good-looking
- hold one's head high — to conduct oneself in a proud and confident manner
- house of assignation — a brothel.
- how about something? — what is your wish, opinion, or information concerning something (or someone)?
- hungarian bromegrass — a pasture grass, Bromus inermis, native to Europe, having smooth blades.
- 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.
- inelastic scattering — a scattering of particles due to an inelastic collision that also changes their wavelengths and phases.
- inertial upper stage — a U.S. two-stage, solid-propellant rocket used to boost a relatively heavy spacecraft from a low earth orbit into a planetary trajectory or an elliptical transfer orbit. Abbreviation: IUS.
- innerspring mattress — a mattress with built-in coil springs
- integration by parts — Mathematics. a method of evaluating an integral by use of the formula, ∫udv = uv − ∫vdu.
- integrity constraint — (database) A constraint (rule) that must remain true for a database to preserve data integrity. Integrity constraints are specified at database creation time and enforced by the database management system. Examples from a genealogical database would be that every individual must be their parent's child or that they can have no more than two natural parents.
- intelligent database — (database) A database management system which performs data validation and processing traditionally done by application programs. Most DBMSs provide some data validation, e.g. rejecting invalid dates or alphabetic data entered into money fields, but often most processing is done by application programs. There is however no limit to the amount of processing that can be done by an intelligent database as long as the process is a standard function for that data. Examples of techniques used to implement intelligent databases are constraints, triggers and stored procedures. Moving processing to the database aids data integrity because it is guaranteed to be consistent across all uses of the data. Mainframe databases have increasingly become more intelligent and personal computer database systems are rapidly following.
- 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
- islets of langerhans — biology: pancreatic cells
- java message service — (programming, messaging) (JMS) An API for accessing enterprise messaging systems from Java programs. Java Message Service, part of the J2EE suite, provides standard APIs that Java developers can use to access the common features of enterprise message systems. JMS supports the publish/subscribe and point-to-point models and allows the creation of message types consisting of arbitrary Java objects. JMS provides support for administration, security, error handling, and recovery, optimisation, distributed transactions, message ordering, message acknowledgment, and more.
- judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
- keep a straight face — look serious, avoid smiling
- king charles spaniel — a variety of the English toy spaniel having a black-and-tan coat.
- king's-pawn openings — a class of chess openings in which the pawn in front of the king is advanced two squares on the first move.
- kingston upon thames — a borough of Greater London, England.
- knights hospitallers — a military religious order founded about the time of the first crusade (1096–99) among European crusaders. It took its name from a hospital and hostel in Jerusalem
- 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
- legal representation — representation by a lawyer
- legislative assembly — the legislature of France 1791–92.
- linage advertisement — advertisements which are costed and paid for according to the number of lines in them
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- linguistic universal — language universal.
- 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.
- macias nguema biyogo — a former name of Bioko.
- magdeburg hemisphere — one of a pair of hemispherical cups from which air can be evacuated when they are placed together: used to demonstrate the force of air pressure.
- 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
- 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.