16-letter words containing a, l, c, m
- dominical letter — any one of the letters from A to G used in church calendars to mark the Sundays throughout any particular year, serving primarily to aid in determining the date of Easter.
- duchess of malfi — a tragedy (1614?) by John Webster.
- dynamic analysis — (programming) Evaluation of a program based on its execution. Dynamic analysis relies on executing a piece of software with selected test data.
- dynamic language — (language) (Dylan) A simple object-oriented Lisp dialect, most closely resembling CLOS and Scheme, developed by Advanced Technology Group East at Apple Computer. See also Marlais.
- economy of scale — a fall in average costs resulting from an increase in the scale of production
- el camino bignum — (humour) /el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ The road mundanely called El Camino Real, a road through the San Francisco peninsula that originally extended all the way down to Mexico City and many portions of which are still intact. Navigation on the San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which defines logical north and south even though it isn't really north-south many places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University. The Spanish word "real" (which has two syllables: /ray-al'/) means "royal"; El Camino Real is "the royal road". In the Fortran language, a "real" quantity is a number typically precise to seven significant digits, and a "double precision" quantity is a larger floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (other languages have similar "real" types). When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on "real", he started calling it "El Camino Double Precision" - but when the hacker was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it "El Camino Bignum", and that name has stuck. (See bignum).
- electrical storm — thunder, lightning
- electromagnetics — Electricity and magnetism, collectively, as a field of study.
- electromagnetism — The interaction of electric currents or fields and magnetic fields.
- electromechanics — the engineering aspects of devices that are controlled by either static or magnetic electric charges
- electromigration — (physics) the transport of small particles under the influence of an electric charge.
- electromyographs — Plural form of electromyograph.
- electromyography — The recording of the electrical activity of muscle tissue, or its representation as a visual display or audible signal, using electrodes attached to the skin or inserted into the muscle.
- encephalomalacia — (medicine) A localized softening of the brain substance, due to hemorrhage or inflammation.
- epigrammatically — In a manner suggesting of an epigram.
- exclamation mark — (character) The character "!" with ASCII code 33. Common names: bang; pling; excl (/eks'kl/); shriek; ITU-T: exclamation mark, exclamation point (US). Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey; wham; eureka; soldier; INTERCAL: spark-spot. The Commonwealth Hackish, "pling", is common among Acorn Archimedes owners. Bang is more common in the USA. The occasional CMU usage, "shriek", is also used by APL fans and mathematicians, especially category theorists. Exclamation mark is used in C and elsewhere as the logical negation operation (NOT).
- exemplifications — Plural form of exemplification.
- exemption clause — a clause in a contract that exempts one party from liability for something
- extrachromosomal — Happening outside a chromosome.
- falsificationism — (epistemology) A scientific philosophy based on the requirement that hypotheses must be falsifiable in order to be scientific; if a claim is not able to be refuted it is not a scientific claim.
- family allowance — a regular government payment to the parents of children up to a certain age
- family balancing — the choosing of the sex of a future child on the basis of how many children of each sex a family already has
- family of curves — a collection of curves whose equations differ only by values assigned a parameter or parameters.
- family physician — a general practitioner.
- firewall machine — (networking, security) A dedicated gateway server with special security precautions on it, used to service external connections (typically from the public Internet). The firewall machine protects servers and networks hidden behind it from crackers. The typical firewall is an inexpensive microprocessor-based Unix machine with no critical data, with public network ports on it, but just one carefully watched connection back to the rest of the cluster. The special precautions may include threat monitoring, call-back, and even a complete iron box keyable to particular incoming IDs or activity patterns. The type of network and security environment of a firewall machine is often called a De-Militarised Zone (DMZ). It may contain other servers such as e-mail servers or proxy gateways - machines that need to be publicly accessible but also need some access to internal systems. Also known as a (Venus) flytrap after the insect-eating plant.
- flame cultivator — an implement that kills weeds by scorching them with a directed flow of flaming gas.
- fluorescent lamp — a tubular electric discharge lamp in which light is produced by the fluorescence of phosphors coating the inside of the tube.
- flying ambulance — an aircraft used to take sick or injured people to hospital
- four-course meal — A four-course meal is a meal that consists of four parts served one after the other.
- frederic mistral — Frédéric [frey-dey-reek] /freɪ deɪˈrik/ (Show IPA), 1830–1914, French Provençal poet: Nobel prize 1904.
- frigate mackerel — a small, blue-green, black-striped fish, Auxis thazard, abundant in tropical seas, having dark, oily flesh that is sometimes used as food.
- fundamentalistic — Fundamentalist.
- galenic pharmacy — the art or practice of preparing and dispensing galenicals.
- garlic mushrooms — mushrooms, often pan-fried, cooked with garlic
- general american — any form of American English speech considered to show few regional peculiarities, usually including all dialects except for eastern New England, New York City, Southern, and South Midland (no longer in technical use). Abbreviation: GA.
- general factotum — a person who does all sorts of jobs; general assistant
- general medicine — non-surgical branch of medicine
- genetic material — material that stores genetic information; DNA
- geometrical pace — a pace of 5 feet (1.5 meters), representing the distance between the places at which the same foot rests on the ground in walking.
- geomorphological — Of or pertaining to geomorphology.
- george mcclellan — George Brinton [brin-tn] /ˈbrɪn tn/ (Show IPA), 1826–85, Union general in the American Civil War.
- germinal vesicle — the large, vesicular nucleus of an ovum before the polar bodies are formed.
- global community — the people or nations of the world, considered as being closely connected by modern telecommunications and as being economically, socially, and politically interdependent
- glycosylceramide — (organic chemistry) Any glycosyl derivative of a ceramide.
- haemodynamically — from a hemodynamic point of view
- hand screw clamp — a screw that can be tightened by the fingers, without the aid of a tool.
- hayes-compatible — (communications) A description of a modem which understands the same set of commands as one made by Hayes.
- hematocrit-value — a centrifuge for separating the cells of the blood from the plasma.
- hematocrystallin — (biology, archaic) hemoglobin.
- hemolytic anemia — an anemic condition characterized by the destruction of red blood cells: seen in some drug reactions and in certain infectious and hereditary disorders.