20-letter words containing a, g, e, m, t
- magnetic declination — variation (def 8).
- magnetic inclination — to plunge (something, as a cloth or sponge) temporarily into a liquid, so as to moisten it, dye it, or cause it to take up some of the liquid: He dipped the brush into the paint bucket.
- 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.
- magnetoencephalogram — a record of the magnetic field of the brain. Abbreviation: MEG.
- magnetohydrodynamics — the branch of physics that deals with the motion of electrically conductive fluids, especially plasmas, in magnetic fields. Abbreviation: MHD.
- mail transport agent — Message Transfer Agent
- mail-order catalogue — a catalogue of goods you can buy from a particular company by mail order
- make goo-goo eyes at — to look at (someone) in a sentimental and embarrassing way
- management committee — a committee of managers or senior members of an organization who are in charge of directing that organization
- manufacturer's agent — an agent representing one or more manufacturers in selling related but noncompeting goods, usually on a commission basis and in a particular territory.
- 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
- marketing department — the department of a commercial organization that deals with the marketing of products
- marriage certificate — official document recording a marriage
- mass-energy equation — the equation, E=mc2, formulated by Albert Einstein, expressing the equivalence between mass and energy, where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the velocity of light.
- matched-pairs design — (of an experiment) concerned with measuring the values of the dependent variables for pairs of subjects that have been matched to eliminate individual differences and that are respectively subjected to the control and the experimental condition
- maximum segment size — (networking) (MSS) The maximum amount of TCP data that a node can send in one segment. This should be the size of the receiver's reassembly buffer to try to avoid fragmentation. The equivalent at the physical layer is "Maximum Transmission Unit".
- mean something to sb — If a name, word, or phrase means something to you, you have heard it before and you know what it refers to.
- measure one's length — to fall, lie, or be thrown down at full length
- mechanical advantage — the ratio of output force to the input force applied to a mechanism.
- medical underwriting — Medical underwriting is the use of medical or health status information in the evaluation of an applicant for life or health insurance.
- 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).
- megakaryocytopoiesis — (biology) The cellular development process that leads to platelet production.
- military engineering — the design, construction, etc, of military fortifications and communications
- minimum lending rate — the official interest rate charged by the Bank of England and below which it will refrain from lending money.
- molecular gastronomy — an approach to cooking in which a chef’s knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology allows him or her to experiment with unusual flavour combinations and cooking techniques
- molecular geneticist — a specialist in the study of the molecular constitution of genes and chromosomes
- monosodium glutamate — a white, crystalline, water-soluble powder, C 5 H 8 NNaO 4 ⋅H 2 O, used to intensify the flavor of foods.
- mopping-up operation — an operation after a battle or campaign to root out remaining enemy forces or installations
- most general unifier — (logic) If U is the most general unifier of a set of expressions then any other unifier, V, can be expressed as V = UW, where W is another substitution. See also unification.
- multicast addressing — Ethernet addressing scheme used to send packets to devices of a certain type or for broadcasting to all nodes. The least significant bit of the most significant byte of a multi-cast address is one.
- multiplicative group — a group in which the operation of the group is multiplication.
- negative campaigning — political campaigning in which a politician or party focuses on criticizing another politician or party rather than emphasizing their own positive qualities
- next program counter — (architecture) (nPC) A register in a CPU that contains the address of the instruction to be executed next.
- nictitating membrane — a thin membrane, or inner or third eyelid, present in many animals, capable of being drawn across the eyeball, as for protection.
- no lack of something — If you say there is no lack of something, you are emphasizing that there is a great deal of it.
- nonrepeating decimal — a decimal representation of any irrational number, having the property that no sequence of digits is repeated ad infinitum.
- omega-3 (fatty acid) — a type of polyunsaturated fatty acid in fish oil, shellfish, soybeans, etc., linked to low cholesterol and low LDL levels
- omega-minus particle — a baryon with strangeness −3, isotopic spin 0, and negative charge; predicted from the mathematics of the Eightfold Way and subsequently discovered. Symbol: Ω −.
- ontological argument — an a priori argument for the existence of God, asserting that as existence is a perfection, and as God is conceived of as the most perfect being, it follows that God must exist; originated by Anselm, later used by Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Leibniz.
- optical mark reading — the reading of marks by an optical device whereby the information can be stored in machine-readable form
- paper chromatography — the separation of mixtures into their constituents by preferential adsorption by a solid, as a column of silica (column chromatography) or a strip of filter paper (paper chromatography) or by a gel.
- paternal grandmother — the mother of someone's father
- peak programme meter — an instrument for assessing the maximum levels of an electrical sound signal
- peremptory challenge — a formal objection to the service of a juror by a party to a criminal prosecution or a civil action that requires no showing of cause.
- personnel management — the branch of management dealing with staff recruitment and matters relating to employees
- physical meteorology — the branch of meteorology dealing with the study of optical, electrical, acoustical, and thermodynamic phenomena in the atmosphere, including the physics of clouds and precipitation.
- piezomagnetic effect — the production of a magnetic field by applying a mechanical stress to certain crystals
- poor man's something — a (cheaper) substitute for something
- prenuptial agreement — A prenuptial agreement is a written contract made between a man and a woman before they marry, in which they state how their assets such as property and money should be divided if they get divorced.
- prescriptive grammar — an approach to grammar that is concerned with establishing norms of correct and incorrect usage and formulating rules based on these norms to be followed by users of the language.