20-letter words containing a, i, n, t, e
- laurentian mountains — a range of low mountains in E Canada, in Quebec between the St Lawrence River and Hudson Bay. Highest point: 1191 m (3905 ft)
- law of superposition — Geology. a basic law of geochronology, stating that in any undisturbed sequence of rocks deposited in layers, the youngest layer is on top and the oldest on bottom, each layer being younger than the one beneath it and older than the one above it.
- lead with one's chin — to act so imprudently as to invite disaster
- 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.
- legal representation — representation by a lawyer
- lieutenant commander — a commissioned officer ranking next below a commander and next above a lieutenant.
- 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
- like a ton of bricks — (used esp of the manner of punishing or reprimanding someone) with great force; severely
- linage advertisement — advertisements which are costed and paid for according to the number of lines in them
- linear extrapolation — Statistics, Mathematics. extrapolation using a linear equation to estimate the value of a variable or function outside the tabulated or observed range.
- linearly ordered set — a set in which a relation, as “less than or equal to,” holds for all pairs of elements of the set.
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- linguistic universal — language universal.
- literate programming — (programming, text) Combining the use of a text formatting language such as TeX and a conventional programming language so as to maintain documentation and source code together. Literate programming may use the inverse comment convention.
- 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
- long island iced tea — a potent cocktail consisting of equal parts of, typically, five different distilled alcoholic liquors, usually vodka, gin, rum, tequila, and triple sec, with a small amount of mixer, usually cola
- longitude by account — the longitude of the position of a vessel as estimated by dead reckoning.
- longitudinal section — the representation of an object as it would appear if cut by the vertical plane passing through the longest axis of the object.
- lump in one's throat — the passage from the mouth to the stomach or to the lungs, including the pharynx, esophagus, larynx, and trachea.
- macular degeneration — degeneration of the central portion of the retina, resulting in a loss of sharp vision.
- magnetic card reader — a device that scans and interprets information from a card with a magnetic stripe
- magnetic coefficient — any of various factors affecting the sensitivity of a ship's magnetic compass as a result of its construction or environment.
- 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.
- 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
- maintenance and cure — the right of an injured sailor to support and medical treatment.
- maintenance contract — a formal agreement between two parties which states that one party will keep a building, vehicle, machine, etc, belonging to the other party in good condition by regularly checking it and repairing it when necessary
- 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.
- management committee — a committee of managers or senior members of an organization who are in charge of directing that organization
- 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.
- mare tranquillitatis — (Sea of Tranquillity) a dark plain in the first quadrant of the face of the moon: about 110,000 sq. mi. (285,000 sq. km).
- marketing department — the department of a commercial organization that deals with the marketing of products
- 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.
- master of ceremonies — a person who directs the entertainment at a party, dinner, nightclub, radio or television broadcast, or the like, acting as host and introducing the speakers or performers. Abbreviation: M.C., MC.
- 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
- material equivalence — equivalence (def 4b).
- material implication — equivalence (def 4a).
- material-equivalence — the state or fact of being equivalent; equality in value, force, significance, etc.
- maternal deprivation — the lack of a mother in a child's life, considered a cause of psychological problems later in life
- 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.
- mechanical advantage — the ratio of output force to the input force applied to a mechanism.
- media access control — (networking) (MAC) The lower sublayer of the OSI data link layer. The interface between a node's Logical Link Control and the network's physical layer. The MAC differs for various physical media. See also MAC Address, Ethernet, IEEE 802.3, token ring.
- medical practitioner — doctor
- medical underwriting — Medical underwriting is the use of medical or health status information in the evaluation of an applicant for life or health insurance.