20-letter words containing a, h, e
- keep a tight rein on — to control carefully; limit
- kick over the traces — either of the two straps, ropes, or chains by which a carriage, wagon, or the like is drawn by a harnessed horse or other draft animal.
- kill the fatted calf — the young of the domestic cow or other bovine animal.
- king charles spaniel — a variety of the English toy spaniel having a black-and-tan coat.
- kingston upon thames — a borough of Greater London, England.
- knight of the garter — a knight who belongs to the Order of the Garter
- 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
- knock the tar out of — any of various dark-colored viscid products obtained by the destructive distillation of certain organic substances, as coal or wood.
- know all the answers — be opinionated
- lampbrush chromosome — a chromosome with looped projections resembling a brush
- last of the mohicans — a historical novel (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper.
- laugh one's head off — Phrases such as laugh your head off and scream your head off can be used to emphasize that someone is laughing or screaming a lot or very loudly.
- lavaliere microphone — a small microphone that hangs around the neck of a performer or speaker.
- lead with one's chin — to act so imprudently as to invite disaster
- learned helplessness — the act of giving up trying as a result of consistent failure to be rewarded in life, thought to be a symptom of depression
- least-squares method — a method of estimating values from a set of observations by minimizing the sum of the squares of the differences between the observations and the values to be found.
- leave sth until last — If you leave something or someone until last, you delay using, choosing, or dealing with them until you have used, chosen, or dealt with all the others.
- life-support machine — A life-support machine is the equipment that is used to keep a person alive when they are very ill and cannot breathe without help.
- lifetime achievement — the notable successes that someone achieves during their life
- light the touchpaper — to do something that will cause much anger or excitement
- like a house on fire — If two people get on like a house on fire, they quickly become close friends, for example because they have many interests in common.
- like death warmed up — very ill
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- little kanawha river — a river in NW West Virginia, flowing N and NW to the Ohio River. 160 miles (257 km) long.
- live and breathe sth — be passionately interested in sth
- llywelyn ap iorwerth — called Llywelyn the Great. died 1240, prince of Gwynedd, N Wales (1194–1238), who extended his rule over most of Wales
- lonely hearts column — the part of a newspaper or magazine where lonely hearts ads appear
- look homeward, angel — a novel (1929) by Thomas Wolfe.
- lord high chancellor — the highest judicial officer of the British crown: law adviser of the ministry, keeper of the great seal, presiding officer in the House of Lords, etc.
- lou gehrig's disease — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
- lump in one's throat — the passage from the mouth to the stomach or to the lungs, including the pharynx, esophagus, larynx, and trachea.
- 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.
- 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 exchange record — (messaging) (MX Record) A DNS resource record type that says which SMTP server handles electronic mail for a particular domain. E.g. the MX record foo.co.uk. 1054 IN MX 10 mail.foo.co.uk. means that mail for an address like "[email protected]" should be sent to "mail.foo.co.uk". There can be several servers for a domain. The "10" is a priority - the server with the lowest number will be tried first.
- make head (n)or tail — If you say that you cannot make head nor tail of something or you cannot make head or tail of it, you are emphasizing that you cannot understand it at all.
- make head or tail of — to attempt to understand (a problem, etc)
- make sheep's eyes at — to look shyly but amorously at
- make short shrift of — to dispose of quickly and unsympathetically
- make the most of sth — take advantage
- malpighian corpuscle — Also called kidney corpuscle, Malpighian body. the structure at the beginning of a vertebrate nephron, consisting of a glomerulus and its surrounding Bowman's capsule.
- mannitol hexanitrate — a colorless, crystalline, water-insoluble, explosive solid, C 6 H 8 N 6 O 1 8 , used as a fulminating agent in percussion caps and in the treatment of hypertension and coronary insufficiency.
- manuel avila camacho — Manuel Ávila [mah-nwel ah-vee-lah] /mɑˈnwɛl ˈɑ viˌlɑ/ (Show IPA). Manuel Avila Camacho.
- maria theresa thaler — a former silver coin of Austria, issued between 1740 and 1780 and used for trade with Ethiopia and other countries; Levant dollar.
- massachusetts ballot — a ballot on which the candidates, with their party designations, are listed alphabetically in columns under the office for which they were nominated.
- master of the revels — an English court official from the late 15th to early 18th centuries responsible to the Lord Chamberlain for overseeing and paying for court entertainments.
- 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
- maternal health care — care for the health of a pregnant woman provided by a hospital or health centre
- 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