20-letter words containing a, l, g, o
- fulminating compound — a fulminate.
- gaff-topsail catfish — a sea catfish, Bagre marinus, occurring in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico from Cape Cod to Panama, and having the spine of the dorsal fin greatly prolonged and flattened.
- garcilaso de la vega — 1503?–36, Spanish poet.
- general postal union — former name of Universal Postal Union. Abbreviation: GPU.
- general practitioner — a medical practitioner whose practice is not limited to any specific branch of medicine or class of diseases. Abbreviation: G.P.
- generative phonology — a theory of phonology that uses a set of rules to derive phonetic representations from abstract underlying forms.
- genetically modified — biologically altered
- gentleman of fortune — an adventurer.
- geological timescale — any division of geological time into chronological units, whether relative (with units in the correct temporal sequence) or absolute (with numerical ages attached)
- get a real computer! — (jargon) A typical hacker response to news that somebody is having trouble getting work done on a toy system or bitty box. The threshold for "real computer" rises with time. As of mid-1993 it meant multi-tasking, with a hard disk, and an address space bigger than 16 megabytes. At this time, according to GLS, computers with character-only displays were verging on "unreal". In 2001, a real computer has a one gigahertz processor, 128 MB of RAM, 20 GB of hard disk, and runs Linux.
- get ahold of oneself — If you get ahold of yourself, you force yourself to become calm and sensible after a shock or in a difficult situation.
- get away from it all — If you get away from it all, you have a holiday in a place that is very different from where you normally live and work.
- get one's hackles up — to become tense with anger; bristle
- glucosamine sulphate — a compound used in some herbal remedies and dietary supplements, esp to strengthen joint cartilage
- glyceryl monoacetate — acetin.
- go like the clappers — to move extremely fast
- goldenhar's syndrome — a congenital disorder in which one side of the face is malformed, often with an enlargement of one side of the mouth. There may also be hearing loss, curvature of the spine, and mild retardation
- good loser/bad loser — If someone is a good loser, they accept that they have lost a game or contest without complaining. If someone is a bad loser, they hate losing and complain about it.
- gorno-altai republic — a constituent republic of S Russia: mountainous, rising over 4350 m (14 500 ft) in the Altai Mountains of the south. Capital: Gorno-Altaisk. Pop: 202 900 (2002). Area: 92 600 sq km (35 740 sq miles)
- governador valadares — a city in E Brazil.
- grade school teacher — a teacher in a grade school
- graphics accelerator — (graphics, hardware) Hardware (often an extra circuit board) to perform tasks such as plotting lines and surfaces in two or three dimensions, filling, shading and hidden line removal.
- gravitational radius — Schwarzschild radius.
- greatest lower bound — a lower bound that is greater than or equal to all the lower bounds of a given set: 1 is the greatest lower bound of the set consisting of 1, 2, 3. Abbreviation: glb.
- greenwich hour angle — hour angle measured from the meridian of Greenwich, England.
- grey-crowned babbler — an insect-eating Australian bird, Pomatostomus temporalis of the family Timaliidae
- grievous bodily harm — law: serious injury
- group life insurance — a form of life insurance available to members of a group, typically employees of a company, under a master policy.
- guarded horn clauses — (language) (GHC) A parallel dialect of Prolog by K. Ueda in which each clause has a guard. GHC is similar to Parlog. When several clauses match a goal, their guards are evaluated in parallel and the first clause whose guard is found to be true is used and others are rejected. It uses committed-choice nondeterminism. See also FGHC, KL1.
- guided visualization — a relaxation technique in which words, sounds, etc., are used to evoke positive mental images, feelings, and thoughts.
- have come a long way — If you say that someone or something has come a long way, you mean that they have developed, progressed, or become very successful.
- he's no oil painting — he is not good-looking
- helicopter parenting — a style of child rearing in which an overprotective mother or father discourages a child's independence by being too involved in the child's life: In typical helicopter parenting, a mother or father swoops in at any sign of challenge or discomfort.
- helmeted guinea fowl — the common guinea fowl in its wild state.
- hierarchical routing — The complex problem of routing on large networks can be simplified by breaking a network into a hierarchy of smaller networks, where each level is responsible for its own routing. The Internet has, basically, three levels: the backbones, the mid-levels, and the stub networks. The backbones know how to route between the mid-levels, the mid-levels know how to route between the sites, and each site (being an autonomous system) knows how to route internally. See also Exterior Gateway Protocol, Interior Gateway Protocol, transit network.
- hildegard von bingen — Hildegard von (Hildegard of Bingen"Sibyl of the Rhine") 1098–1178, German nun, healer, writer, and composer.
- historical sociology — the sociological study of the origins and development of societies and of other social phenomena that seeks underlying laws and principles.
- hold one's head high — to conduct oneself in a proud and confident manner
- hyperbolic cotangent — a hyperbolic function that is the ratio of cosh to sinh, being the reciprocal of tanh; coth
- ignatius (of) loyola — Saint(born Iñigo López de Recalde) (1491-1556); Sp. priest: founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuit order): his day is July 31
- in flagrante delicto — Law. in the very act of committing the offense.
- industrial espionage — the stealing of technological or commercial research data, blueprints, plans, etc., as by a person in the hire of a competing company.
- industrial sociology — the sociological study of social relationships and social structures in business settings.
- infiltration gallery — a conduit, built in permeable earth, for collecting ground water.
- initial program load — (operating system) (IPL) The procedure used to (re-)start a computer system by copying the operating system kernel into main memory and running it. Part of the boot sequence.
- international gothic — a style of Gothic art, especially painting, developed in Europe in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, chiefly characterized by details carefully delineated in a naturalistic manner, elongated and delicately modeled forms, the use of complex perspective, and an emphasis on the decorative or ornamental aspect of drapery, foliage, or setting.
- international orange — a shade of bright orange, highly visible at a great distance and in murky weather, used to color aircraft, airport towers and hangars, boats, etc., for safety or rescue purposes.
- into/in cold storage — If you put an idea or plan into cold storage or in cold storage, you delay it for a while rather than acting on it as you originally intended.
- islets of langerhans — biology: pancreatic cells
- job control language — a language used to construct statements that identify a particular job to be run and specify the job's requirements to the operating system under which it will run. Abbreviation: JCL.