20-letter words containing a, p, i, n
- 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.
- mail transport agent — Message Transfer Agent
- 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.
- marginal probability — (in a multivariate distribution) the probability of one variable taking a specific value irrespective of the values of the others
- marketing department — the department of a commercial organization that deals with the marketing of products
- 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 implication — equivalence (def 4a).
- maternal deprivation — the lack of a mother in a child's life, considered a cause of psychological problems later in life
- mechanical impedance — impedance (def 2).
- mechanical-impedance — Electricity. the total opposition to alternating current by an electric circuit, equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the resistance and reactance of the circuit and usually expressed in ohms. Symbol: Z.
- medical practitioner — doctor
- member of parliament — A Member of Parliament is a person who has been elected by the people in a particular area to represent them in a country's parliament. The abbreviation MP is often used.
- mexican jumping bean — jumping bean.
- 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
- missionary apostolic — an honorary title conferred by the pope on certain missionaries.
- mopping-up operation — an operation after a battle or campaign to root out remaining enemy forces or installations
- multipart stationery — continuous stationery comprising two or more sheets, either carbonless or with carbon paper between the sheets
- multiple inheritance — (programming) In object-oriented programming, the possibility that a class may have more than one direct superclass in the class hierarchy. The opposite is single inheritance.
- multiple personality — a rare disorder in which an individual displays several functionally dissociated personalities, each of a complexity comparable to that of a normal individual.
- multiplication table — Arithmetic. a tabular listing of the products of any two numbers of a set, usually of the integers 1 through 10 or 1 through 12.
- multistep hydroplane — a motorship having a flat bottom built as a series of planes inclined forward, the ship planing on each from stem to stern as its speed increases.
- neapolitan ice cream — variously flavored and colored ice cream and ice mixtures frozen in layers.
- negative campaigning — political campaigning in which a politician or party focuses on criticizing another politician or party rather than emphasizing their own positive qualities
- nephroangiosclerosis — (pathology) sclerosis of the renal arterioles.
- net national product — the gross national product less allowance for depreciation of capital goods. Abbreviation: NNP.
- neurophysiologically — In terms of, or with regard to, neurophysiology.
- neuropsychiatrically — In terms of neuropsychiatry.
- neuropsychologically — In terms of or by means of neuropsychology.
- new democratic party — the Canadian social democratic party formed in 1961
- 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.
- nine plus zero array — the arrangement of microtubules characteristic of basal bodies and centrioles, consisting of nine evenly spaced triplets between the outer and inner walls of the structure and having no central microtubules. Symbol: 9 + 0.
- non-optimal solution — (Or "sub-optimal solution") An astoundingly stupid way to do something. This term is generally used in deadpan sarcasm, as its impact is greatest when the person speaking looks completely serious. See also Bad Thing.
- nondirective therapy — client-centered therapy.
- nonrepeating decimal — a decimal representation of any irrational number, having the property that no sequence of digits is repeated ad infinitum.
- north american plate — a major tectonic division of the earth's crust, comprising Greenland and the continent of North America and the suboceanic Labrador and North American Basins, and bounded on the east by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, on the south by the Caribbean and South American Plates, and on the west by the San Andreas fault and Aleutian Trench.
- north celestial pole — the point of intersection of the earth's extended axis and the northern half of the celestial sphere, lying about 1° from Polaris
- occupation franchise — the right of a tenant to vote in national and local elections
- occupation groupings — a system of classifying people according to occupation, based originally on information obtained by government census and subsequently developed by market research. The classifications are used by the advertising industry to identify potential markets. The groups are A, B, C1, C2, D, and E
- occupational disease — Also called industrial disease. a disease caused by the conditions or hazards of a particular occupation.
- occupational pension — a pension scheme provided for the members of a particular occupation or by a specific employer or group of employers
- occupational therapy — a form of therapy in which patients are encouraged to engage in vocational tasks or expressive activities, as art or dance, usually in a social setting.
- omega-minus particle — a baryon with strangeness −3, isotopic spin 0, and negative charge; predicted from the mathematics of the Eightfold Way and subsequently discovered. Symbol: Ω −.
- one's spiritual home — Your spiritual home is the place where you feel that you belong, usually because your ideas or attitudes are the same as those of the people who live there.
- open learning centre — an establishment which provides further education on a flexible part-time basis
- operant conditioning — conditioning (def 1).
- operating conditions — Operating conditions are a set of conditions for operating a particular system or process.
- operation barbarossa — the codename for Hitler's invasion (1941) of Russia
- operational calculus — a method for solving a differential equation by treating differential operators as ordinary algebraic quantities, thus obtaining a simpler problem.
- operational database — (database) A database containing up-to-date, modifiable data, in contrast to a decision support database.
- operational strategy — a plan or set of plans for successfully running a business, etc