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25-letter words containing a, e, r, i

  • intercommunication system — a communication system within a building, ship, airplane, local area, etc., with a loudspeaker or receiver for listening and a microphone for speaking at each of two or more points.
  • interior gateway protocol — (IGP) An Internet protocol which distributes routing information to the routers within an autonomous system. The term "gateway" is historical, "router" is currently the preferred term. See also Exterior Gateway Protocol, Open Shortest Path First, Routing Information Protocol.
  • interlocking directorates — a corporate directorate that includes one or more members who serve simultaneously in the directorates of other corporations.
  • intermediate vector boson — one of the three particles that are believed to transmit the weak force: the positively charged W particle, the negatively charged W particle, and the neutral Z 0 particle.
  • intermittent claudication — pain and cramp in the calf muscles, aggravated by walking and caused by an insufficient supply of blood
  • internal field separators — (operating system)   ($IFS) A predefined environment variable in the Unix Bourne shell whose default value is the three-character string containing space, tab and line feed. Any string of one or more of these characters separates the command and each of its arguments in a command line. $IFS also tells the shell's built-in read command where to split an input line when reading into multiple variables. E.g. setting IFS=: would be appropriate for reading a file with ':'-separated fields, such as /etc/passwd.
  • international atomic time — a system of measuring time based on atomic clocks that measure the second as the basic unit of time in the International System of Units (SI). Abbreviation: IAT.
  • international match point — a unit of scoring in contract bridge tournaments held in Europe. Abbreviation: IMP.
  • interstate highway system — a network of U.S. highways connecting the 48 contiguous states and most of the cities with populations above 50,000, begun in the 1950s and estimated to carry about a fifth of the nation's traffic.
  • jakob-creutzfeldt disease — Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
  • japanese flowering cherry — any of various ornamental hybrid cherry trees developed in Japan, having white or pink blossoms and inedible fruit.
  • java run-time environment — (language)   (JRE) The part of the Java Development Kit required to run Java programs. The JRE consists of the Java Virtual Machine, the Java platform core classes and supporting files. It does not include the compiler, debugger or other tools present in the JDK. The JRE is the smallest set of executables and files that constitute the standard Java platform.
  • jean-maurice-Émile baudot — (person)   (1845-1903) The inventor of the Baudot code. Baudot joined the French Post & Telegraph Administration in 1869 as a telegraph operator. In his own time he developed a code for sending several messages at once. In 1874 Baudot patented his first printing telegraph where signals were translated onto paper tape. The Baudot code was adopted first in France and then by other nations for and transmissions. The unit of transmission speed, baud, is named after him.
  • kabardino-balkar republic — a constituent republic of S Russia, on the N side of the Caucasus Mountains. Capital: Nalchik. Pop: 900 500 (2002). Area: 12 500 sq km (4825 sq miles)
  • kent recursive calculator — (language)   (KRC) A lazy functional language developed by David Turner in 1981, based on SASL, with pattern matching and ZF expressions. See also continental drift.
  • khakass autonomous region — an autonomous region in the Russian Federation, in S Siberia. 19,161 sq. mi. (49,627 sq. km). Capital: Abakan.
  • kwantung leased territory — a strategic territory of NE China, at the S tip of the Liaodong Peninsula of Manchuria: leased forcibly by Russia in 1898; taken over by Japan in 1905; occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945 and subsequently returned to China on the condition of shared administration; made part of Liaoning province by China in 1954. Area: about 3400 sq km (1300 sq miles)
  • language sensitive editor — (LSE) A language-sensitive editor from DEC.
  • language-sensitive editor — An editor that is aware of the syntactic, semantic and in some cases the structural rules of a specific programming language and provides a framework for the user to enter source code. Programs or changes to previously stored programs are incrementally parsed into an abstract syntax tree and automatically checked for correctness.
  • leaf distribution limited — A UK connectivity software supplier which also provides SERVELAN, a country-wide Internet access service. E-mail: <[email protected]>. Address: 7 Elmwood, Chineham Business Park, Crockford Lane, BASINGSTOKE RG24 0WG. Telephone: +44 (1256) 707 777. Fax: +44 (1256) 707 555.
  • learning resources center — a library, usually in an educational institution, that includes and encourages the use of audiovisual aids and other special materials for learning in addition to books, periodicals, and the like.
  • learning resources centre — a centre that provides educational equipment and material
  • letters of administration — a formal document nominating a specified person to take over, administer, and dispose of an estate when there is no executor to carry out the testator's will
  • licensed vocational nurse — a person with specified training who has become licensed to provide vocational assistance to patients. Abbreviation: LVN.
  • lie at (or on) the lurch — to lie in wait
  • limited-slip differential — an automotive differential that can transfer power from a wheel that has lost traction to one that has not.
  • local education authority — a body that is responsible for education in a particular area
  • lowest common denominator — least common denominator.
  • magnetic character reader — a device that automatically scans and interprets characters printed with magnetic ink. It operates by the process of magnetic character recognition
  • magnetic resonance imager — a device which uses a noninvasive medical diagnostic technique in which the absorption and transmission of high-frequency radio waves are analysed as they irradiate the hydrogen atoms in water molecules and other tissue components placed in a strong magnetic field
  • magnetohydromagnetic wave — Physics. Alfvén wave.
  • maintenance of membership — an arrangement or agreement between an employer and a labor union by which employees who are members of the union at the time the agreement is made, or who subsequently join, must either remain members until the agreement expires, or be discharged.
  • make bricks without straw — a block of clay hardened by drying in the sun or burning in a kiln, and used for building, paving, etc.: traditionally, in the U.S., a rectangle 2.25 × 3.75 × 8 inches (5.7 × 9.5 × 20.3 cm), red, brown, or yellow in color.
  • marcus aurelius antoninus — Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius.
  • marcus-valerius-martialis — (Marcus Valerius Martialis) a.d. 43?–104? Roman epigrammatist, born in Spain.
  • massacre of the innocents — the slaughter of all the young male children of Bethlehem at Herod's command in an attempt to destroy Jesus (Matthew 2:16–18)
  • medical officer of health — a person appointed by a local or national authority to be in charge of its health policy
  • memorandum of association — a document giving details such as the company's name, the purpose of the company, and the address of its registered office that is legally required when incorporating a company in certain countries such as the UK
  • mens sana in corpore sano — a sound mind in a sound body
  • message passing interface — (communications, protocol)   A de facto standard for communication among the nodes running a parallel program on a distributed memory system. MPI is a library of routines that can be called from Fortran and C programs. MPI's advantage over older message passing libraries is that it is both portable (because MPI has been implemented for almost every distributed memory architecture) and fast (because each implementation is optimised for the hardware it runs on).
  • metal oxide semiconductor — a three-layer sandwich of a metal, an insulator (usually an oxide of the substrate), and a semiconductor substrate, used in integrated circuits. Abbreviation: MOS.
  • metal-free phthalocyanine — phthalocyanine (def 1).
  • methylrosaniline chloride — gentian violet.
  • metropolitan area network — (MAN) A data network intended to serve an area the size of a large city. Such networks are being implemented by innovative techniques, such as running optical fibre through subway tunnels. A popular example of a MAN is SMDS. See also Local Area Network, Wide Area Network.
  • mount kenya national park — a national park in Kenya, located in the regions of Mount Kenya that are above 3200 m (10 500 ft); now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the park covers 1420 sq km (548 sq miles)
  • multi-scene control board — preset board.
  • my favourite toy language — (jargon, language)   (MFTL) Describes a talk on a programming language design that is heavy on syntax (with lots of BNF), sometimes even talks about semantics (e.g. type systems), but rarely, if ever, has any content (see content-free). More broadly applied to talks - even when the topic is not a programming language --- in which the subject matter is gone into in unnecessary and meticulous detail at the sacrifice of any conceptual content. "Well, it was a typical MFTL talk". 2. A language about which the developers are passionate (often to the point of prosyletic zeal) but no one else cares about. Applied to the language by those outside the originating group. "He cornered me about type resolution in his MFTL." The first great goal in the mind of the designer of an MFTL is usually to write a compiler for it, then bootstrap the design away from contamination by lesser languages by writing a compiler for it in itself. Thus, the standard put-down question at an MFTL talk is "Has it been used for anything besides its own compiler?". On the other hand, a language that *cannot* be used to write its own compiler is beneath contempt. See break-even point, toolsmith.
  • national enterprise board — a public corporation established in 1975 to help the economy of the UK. In 1981 it merged with the National Research and Development Council to form the British Technology Group
  • national insurance number — a number allocated to UK citizens so that they can pay national insurance
  • national liberation front — the name taken by nationalist insurgent groups in various countries.
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