20-letter words containing a, m, p, c, o
- criminal proceedings — action taken in a court to bring a criminal prosecution against someone
- cross someone's palm — to give someone money
- cross someone's path — to meet or thwart someone
- darkfield microscope — kind of microscope
- decompartmentalizing — Present participle of decompartmentalize.
- demographic timebomb — a predicted shortage of school-leavers and consequently of available workers, caused by an earlier drop in the birth rate, resulting in an older workforce
- desmopressin acetate — a vasopressin analogue, C 46 H 64 N 14 O 12 S 2 , used in the treatment of diabetes insipidus.
- diamondback terrapin — any edible North American terrapin of the genus Malaclemys, esp M. terrapin, occurring in brackish and tidal waters and having diamond-shaped markings on the shell: family Emydidae
- diplomatic secretary — secretary (def 5).
- diplomatic-secretary — secretary (def 5).
- displacement tonnage — the number of long tons of water displaced by a vessel, light or load displacement being specified.
- drum and bugle corps — a marching band of drum players and buglers.
- education department — the department of a local authority that is concerned with education, or the government department concerned with education
- effective computable — (theory) A term describing a function for which there is an effective algorithm that correctly calculates the function. The algorithm must consist of a finite sequence of instructions.
- electroencephalogram — A test or record of brain activity produced by electroencephalography.
- electromagnetic pump — a device for pumping liquid metals by placing a pipe between the poles of an electromagnet and passing a current through the liquid metal
- employee association — an organization, other than a trade union, whose members comprise employees of a single employing organization. The aims of the association may be social, recreational, or professional
- environmental impact — the impact on the environment created by an industry, service, plan, or project
- essential complexity — (programming) A measure of the "structuredness" of a program.
- flame-fusion process — Verneuil process.
- friar minor capuchin — capuchin (def 4).
- fulminating compound — a fulminate.
- 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.
- glucosamine sulphate — a compound used in some herbal remedies and dietary supplements, esp to strengthen joint cartilage
- hampton court palace — a royal palace in Hampton, London, built in 1515 by Cardinal Wolsey
- harmonic progression — a series of numbers the reciprocals of which are in arithmetic progression.
- hudson's bay company — a company chartered in England in 1670 to carry on fur trading with the Indians in North America.
- human genome project — a federally funded U.S. scientific project to identify both the genes and the entire sequence of DNA base pairs that make up the human genome.
- hyperadrenocorticism — Cushing's syndrome.
- hypercholesterolemia — the presence of an excessive amount of cholesterol in the blood.
- hyperhomocysteinemia — (medicine) The presence of an excessive amount of homocysteine in the blood.
- imported currantworm — the larva of any of several insects, as a sawfly, Nematus ribesii (imported currantworm) which infests and feeds on the leaves and fruit of currants.
- in the public domain — able to be discussed and examined freely by the general public
- income tax inspector — a person whose job is to assess individuals' income tax liability
- incomplete dominance — the appearance in a heterozygote of a trait that is intermediate between either of the trait's homozygous phenotypes.
- incorporated company — a legally constituted company
- insulin-coma therapy — a former treatment for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, employing insulin-induced hypoglycemia as a method for producing convulsive seizures.
- james prescott joule — James Prescott, 1818–89, English physicist.
- lampbrush chromosome — a chromosome with looped projections resembling a brush
- lavaliere microphone — a small microphone that hangs around the neck of a performer or speaker.
- 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.
- 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.
- magnetoencephalogram — a record of the magnetic field of the brain. Abbreviation: MEG.
- 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.
- material implication — equivalence (def 4a).
- medical practitioner — doctor
- megabytes per second — (unit) (MBps, MB/s) Millions of bytes per second. A unit of data rate. 1 MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes per second (not 1,048,576).
- megakaryocytopoiesis — (biology) The cellular development process that leads to platelet production.
- memory address space — (architecture) 1. Any part of a processor's address space that is occupied by memory. 2. The range of addresses seen by a memory device relative to the base address at which it is mapped into the processor's address space.
- mickey mouse program — (jargon) The North American equivalent of a "noddy program", i.e. trivial. The term doesn't necessarily have the belittling connotations of mainstream slang "Oh, that's just mickey mouse stuff!"; sometimes trivial programs can be very useful.