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18-letter words containing a, g, h, s

  • kansas gay-feather — prairie button snakeroot.
  • king of the castle — most powerful figure
  • king-of-the-salmon — a ribbonfish, Trachypterus altivelis, of northern parts of the Pacific Ocean.
  • knights of pythias — a fraternal order founded in Washington, D.C., in 1864.
  • lagrange's theorem — the theorem that the order of each subgroup of a finite group is a factor of the order of the group.
  • laying on of hands — Theology. a rite in which the cleric's hands are placed on the head of a person being confirmed, ordained, or the like.
  • legislative branch — the branch of government having the power to make laws; the legislature.
  • light displacement — the weight of a ship with all its permanent equipment, excluding the weight of cargo, persons, ballast, dunnage, and fuel, but usually including the weight of permanent ballast and water used to operate steam machinery.
  • lightning arrester — a device for preventing damage to radio, telephonic, or other electric equipment from lightning or other high-voltage currents, using spark gaps to carry the current to the ground without passing through the device.
  • lithostratigraphic — Of or pertaining to lithostratigraphy.
  • logarithmic spiral — log r = aθ
  • logarithmus dualis — (mathematics)   (ld) Latin for logarithm base two. More commonly written as "log" with a subscript "2". Roughly the number of bits required to represent an integer.
  • logical shift left — logical shift
  • lubber grasshopper — plains grasshopper.
  • magic switch story — Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no-one knows who). You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labelled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words "magic" and "more magic". The switch was in the "more magic" position. I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side. It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed. Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the "more magic" position before reviving the computer. A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the "more magic" position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch. The computer promptly crashed. This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since. We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic. I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on "more magic".
  • malpighian tubules — one of a group of long, slender excretory tubules at the anterior end of the hindgut in insects and other terrestrial arthropods.
  • marketing research — the study of influences upon customer and consumer behaviour and the analysis of market characteristics and trends
  • materials handling — the loading, unloading, and movement of goods, as within a factory or warehouse, especially by the aid of mechanical devices.
  • mechanical testing — Mechanical testing is the testing of a material to find out its mechanical properties, for example its yield strength or hardness.
  • menthol cigarettes — cigarettes that are flavoured with menthol
  • microsoft exchange — (messaging)   Microsoft's messaging and enterprise collaboration server. Exchange's primary role is as an electronic mail message store but it can also store calendars, task lists, contact details, and other data.
  • moccasin telegraph — the transmission of rumour or secret information; the grapevine
  • monographic series — a series of monographs issued in uniform style or format and related by subject or by issuing agency.
  • move the goalposts — to change the aims of an activity to ensure the desired results
  • negative cash flow — the situation when income is less than payments
  • neo-pythagoreanism — a philosophical system, established in Alexandria and Rome in the second century b.c., consisting mainly of revived Pythagorean doctrines with elements of Platonism and Stoicism.
  • netherlands guiana — a former name of Suriname.
  • neurophysiological — the branch of physiology dealing with the functions of the nervous system.
  • neuropsychological — Of or pertaining to neuropsychology, the relation or combination of brain and mind.
  • nightmare scenario — If you describe a situation or event as a nightmare scenario, you mean that it is the worst possible thing that could happen.
  • not a pretty sight — If you say that someone or something is not a pretty sight, you mean that it is not pleasant to look at.
  • not by a long shot — absolutely not
  • offset lithography — offset (def 6).
  • on the danger list — critically ill in hospital
  • open heart surgery — surgery performed on the exposed heart while a heart-lung machine pumps and oxygenates the blood and diverts it from the heart.
  • open-heart surgery — surgery performed on the exposed heart while a heart-lung machine pumps and oxygenates the blood and diverts it from the heart.
  • orthotungstic acid — an oxyacid acid of tungsten. Formula: H2WO4
  • oscillographically — By means of oscillography.
  • palm beach gardens — a city in SE Florida, near North Palm Beach.
  • parathyroid glands — any of several small oval glands usually lying near or embedded in the thyroid gland.
  • pemphigus vulgaris — a potentially fatal blistering skin disease, characterized by large blisters on the skin, mucous membranes of the mouth, genitals, intestines, etc, which eventually rupture and form painful denuded areas from which critical amounts of bodily protein, fluid, and blood may be lost
  • phantasmagorically — having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination.
  • phase-shift keying — (communications)   (PSK) A digital modulation scheme that conveys data by changing the phase of a carrier wave. The data can either determine the absolute phase relative to the unmodulated carrier or reference signal ("coherent phase-shift keying", CPSK) or the change in phase ("differential phase-shift keying", DPSK). The number of different phases used determines the amount of data that can be transmitted in each cycle. Each cycle can be considered to constitute one "symbol", e.g. with two possible phases, each cycle carries one bit. The more phases that are used, the less tollerant to noise the transmissions becomes. Alternatives to PSK are amplitude-shift keying (ASK) and frequency-shift keying (FSK).
  • photochemical smog — air pollution containing ozone and other reactive chemical compounds formed by the action of sunlight on nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons, especially those in automobile exhaust.
  • physical geography — the branch of geography concerned with natural features and phenomena of the earth's surface, as landforms, drainage features, climates, soils, and vegetation.
  • pigmy hippopotamus — a related but smaller animal, Choeropsis liberiensis
  • plains grasshopper — a large, destructive short-horned grasshopper, Brachystola magna, of the western U.S., marked by pinkish hind wings.
  • positively charged — having a positive charge
  • prerelease showing — a showing of a film before it goes on general release
  • press photographer — a photographer who works for a newspaper, magazine, etc
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