20-letter words containing a, k, i, n
- frosting on the cake — a sweet mixture, cooked or uncooked, for coating or filling cakes, cookies, and the like; icing.
- green monkey disease — Marburg disease.
- hang up one's spikes — to retire, as from a professional sport
- hardware handshaking — (communications) A technique for regulating the flow of data across an interface by means of signals carried on separate wires. A common example is the RTS (Request to Send) and CTS (Clear to Send) signals on an EIA-232 serial line. The alternative, software handshaking, uses two special characters inserted into the data stream to carry the same information.
- holy water sprinkler — morning star (def 2).
- how are you keeping? — how are you?
- interpersonal skills — skills that contribute to dealing successfully with other people
- jasper national park — a national park in the Canadian Rockies in W Alberta, in SW Canada.
- java development kit — (language, compiler) (JDK) A free Sun Microsystems product which provides the environment required for programming in Java. The JDK is available for a variety of platforms, but most notably Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows.
- jerk someone's chain — to tease, mislead, or harass someone
- kamin's interpreters — (language, tool) A set of interpreters for Pascal, Lisp, APL, Scheme, SASL, CLU, Smalltalk, and Prolog. Tim Budd <[email protected]> implemented them as subclasses in C++ sometime before 1991-09-12.
- keep a tight rein on — to control carefully; limit
- keratoconjunctivitis — inflammation of the cornea and conjunctiva.
- king charles spaniel — a variety of the English toy spaniel having a black-and-tan coat.
- king's-pawn openings — a class of chess openings in which the pawn in front of the king is advanced two squares on the first move.
- 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
- kruger national park — a wildlife sanctuary in NE South Africa: the world's largest game reserve. Area: over 21 700 sq km (8400 sq miles)
- 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 a ton of bricks — (used esp of the manner of punishing or reprimanding someone) with great force; severely
- little kanawha river — a river in NW West Virginia, flowing N and NW to the Ohio River. 160 miles (257 km) long.
- logical link control — (networking) (LLC) The upper portion of the data link layer, as defined in IEEE 802.2. The LLC sublayer presents a uniform interface to the user of the data link service, usually the network layer. Beneath the LLC sublayer is the Media Access Control (MAC) sublayer.
- 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.
- make a/no difference — If something makes a difference or makes a lot of difference, it affects you and helps you in what you are doing. If something makes no difference, it does not have any effect on what you are doing.
- 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.
- marketing department — the department of a commercial organization that deals with the marketing of products
- microwave background — a background of microwave electromagnetic radiation with a black-body spectrum discovered in 1965, understood to be the thermal remnant of the big bang with which the universe began
- minkowski space-time — a four-dimensional space in which three coordinates specify the position of a point in space and the fourth represents the time at which an event occurred at that point
- nickel tetracarbonyl — nickel carbonyl.
- niemann-pick disease — a rare, hereditary lipid-storage disease, occurring primarily among Ashkenazic Jews, in which abnormal lipid metabolism results in enlargement of the liver, spleen, and lymph nodes, and in progressive mental and physical deterioration.
- nikkei stock average — an index of prices on the Tokyo Stock Exchange
- no lack of something — If you say there is no lack of something, you are emphasizing that there is a great deal of it.
- optical mark reading — the reading of marks by an optical device whereby the information can be stored in machine-readable form
- packed like sardines — If you say that a crowd of people are packed like sardines, you are emphasizing that they are sitting or standing so close together that they cannot move easily.
- parkinson's syndrome — a complex of symptoms indistinguishable from Parkinson's disease, commonly affecting boxers or sometimes occurring as a result of substance abuse or an encephalitic infection.
- pick someone's brain — to obtain information or ideas from someone
- pickwickian syndrome — an abnormality characterized by extreme obesity accompanied by sleepiness, hypoventilation, and polycythemia.
- punch a (time) clock — to insert a timecard into a time clock when coming to or going from work
- quaker meeting house — a place where Quakers gather for worship
- rankine-cycle engine — a type of steam engine involving a continuous cycle of vaporization of liquid and condensation back to liquid in a sealed system: developed experimentally for use in automobiles to reduce polluting emissions, utilize cheaper fuels, etc.
- rattlesnake plantain — any of several low, terrestrial orchids, as Goodyera repens, of northern temperate regions, having a basal rosette of leaves with white veins and a one-sided spike of white flowers.
- red-winged blackbird — a North American blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus, the male of which is black with scarlet patches, usually bordered with buff or yellow, on the bend of the wing.
- regenerative braking — Regenerative braking is a form of braking in electric vehicles in which the loss of kinetic energy from braking is stored and then fed back later to provide power to the electric motor.
- ride on shank's mare — to walk
- ring-necked parakeet — a small brightly coloured long-tailed tropical parrot, Psittacula krameri, often kept as a pet
- ring-necked pheasant — a gallinaceous Asian bird, Phasianus colchicus, having a white band around its neck, introduced into Great Britain, North America, and the Hawaiian Islands.
- rocky mountain basic — (language) The BASIC language used by Hewlett Packard on their 680x0-based computers. Rocky Mountain Basic is good for interfaces to IEEE 488 controls and contains many mathematical and matrix functions. It has about 600 commands. Typical applications include automatic test stations.
- rocky mountain sheep — bighorn.
- season ticket holder — a person who has a season ticket