19-letter words containing a, e
- multinomial theorem — an expression of a power of a sum in terms of powers of the addends, a generalization of the binomial theorem.
- multiple-entry visa — a visa that permits the holder to enter a country several times
- multiplexor channel — (MPX) mainframe terminology for a slow peripheral device connection, e.g. for a printer, operator console, or card reader.
- munchausen syndrome — a factitious disorder in which otherwise healthy individuals seek to hospitalize themselves with feigned or self-induced pathology in order to receive surgical or other medical treatment.
- mushroom ventilator — a ventilator having at the top of a vertical shaft a broad rounded cap that can be screwed down to close it.
- music to one's ears — something that is very pleasant to hear
- naberezhniye chelny — city in E European Russia, on the Kama River: pop. 514,000
- nagling coalescence — (networking, algorithm) An algorithm for improving TCP/IP network performance by combining small packets ("tinygrams") into larger ones, thus reducing the per-packet overhead. The server transmits the packet either when it has reached a preset size or when it receives an acknowledgment of the previous packet.
- nail polish remover — solvent for removing nail polish
- napierian logarithm — natural logarithm.
- nasty piece of work — malicious person
- nathaniel hawthorne — Nathaniel, 1804–64, U.S. novelist and short-story writer.
- national assistance — (in Britain) formerly a weekly allowance paid to certain people by the state to bring their incomes up to minimum levels established by law
- national characters — (character) Characters with accents and other diacritical marks that are used in certain written languages (that are based on the Roman alphabet) but not in others, particularly not in English. A standard list is ISO Latin 1.
- national convention — French History. the legislature of France 1792–95.
- national government — A national government is a government with members from more than one political party, especially one that is formed during a crisis.
- national serviceman — a soldier undertaking compulsory military service
- natural catastrophe — A natural catastrophe is an unexpected event, caused by nature, such as an earthquake or flood, in which there is a lot of suffering, damage, or death.
- natural killer cell — a small killer cell that destroys virus-infected cells or tumor cells without activation by an immune system cell or antibody.
- near letter quality — a quality of print that is not quite letter quality, but is better than draft quality
- near to one's heart — cherished or important
- nearest and dearest — People sometimes refer to their close relatives and friends as their nearest and dearest.
- neats vs. scruffies — (artificial intelligence, jargon) The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in artificial intelligence research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; "neats" tend to try to build systems that "reason" in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while "scruffies" profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favour looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture "common sense" of living intelligences.
- necessary condition — prerequisite
- negation by failure — An extralogical feature of Prolog and other logic programming languages in which failure of unification is treated as establishing the negation of a relation. For example, if Ronald Reagan is not in our database and we asked if he was an American, Prolog would answer "no".
- negative income tax — a system of income subsidy through which persons having less than a certain annual income receive money from the government rather than pay taxes to it.
- negative resistance — a characteristic of certain electronic components in which an increase in the applied voltage increases the resistance, producing a proportional decrease in current
- neighbourhood watch — a scheme under which members of a community agree together to take responsibility for keeping an eye on each other's property, as a way of preventing crime
- nernst heat theorem — the principle that reactions in crystalline solids involve changes in entropy that tend to zero as the temperature approaches absolute zero
- nerve growth factor — a protein that promotes the growth, organization, and maintenance of sympathetic and some sensory nerve cells. Abbreviation: NGF.
- network termination — (NT, NT1) A device connecting the customer's data or telephone equipment to the local ISDN exchange carrier's line. The NT device provides a connection for terminal equipment (TE) and terminal adaptor (TA) equipment to the local loop.
- neufchâtel (cheese) — a soft white cheese prepared from whole milk or skim milk and eaten fresh or cured
- neuropathologically — In a neuropathologic way.
- neuropsychodynamics — The theoretical synthesis of neuroscience and psychodynamics.
- neurotransmissional — Relating to neurotransmission.
- neville chamberlain — (Arthur) Neville, 1869–1940, British statesman: prime minister 1937–40.
- new general catalog — a catalog of star clusters, galaxies, and other non-stellar objects, published in 1888
- new year resolution — a promise to yourself or decision to do something, especially to improve one's behaviour or lifestyle in some way, during the year ahead
- new zealand spinach — a plant, Tetragonia tetragonioides, of warm regions, cultivated for its edible leaves, eaten as a vegetable.
- newcastle upon tyne — 1st Duke of, Pelham-Holles, Thomas.
- newtonian mechanics — the branch of mechanics that is based on Newton's laws of motion and that is applicable to systems that are so large that Planck's constant can be regarded as negligibly small (distinguished from quantum mechanics).
- newtonian telescope — a reflecting telescope in which a mirror or reflecting prism is mounted on the axis near the eyepiece so that the image may be viewed from outside the telescope tube at right angles to the axis.
- niagara-on-the-lake — a town in SE Ontario, in S Canada, on Lake Ontario, at the mouth of the Niagara River, on the border between Canada and New York.
- niccolo machiavelli — Niccolò di Bernardo [neek-kaw-law dee ber-nahr-daw] /ˌnik kɔˈlɔ di bɛrˈnɑr dɔ/ (Show IPA), 1469–1527, Italian statesman, political philosopher, and author.
- nicolaus copernicus — Nicolaus [nik-uh-ley-uh s] /ˌnɪk əˈleɪ əs/ (Show IPA), (Mikolaj Kopernik) 1473–1543, Polish astronomer who promulgated the now accepted theory that the earth and the other planets move around the sun (the Copernican System)
- nine plus two array — the arrangement of microtubules in a flagellum or cilium, consisting of a ring of nine evenly spaced couplets surrounding two central singlets. Symbol: 9 + 2.
- nine--days---wonder — an event or thing that arouses considerable but short-lived interest or excitement.
- no strings attached — without conditions
- no-write allocation — (memory management) A cache policy where only processor reads are cached, thus avoiding the need for write-back or write-through.
- nominative absolute — a construction consisting in English of a noun, noun phrase, or pronoun in the nominative case followed by a predicate lacking a finite verb, used as a loose modifier of the whole sentence, as the play done in The play done, the audience left the theater.