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18-letter words containing a, r, g, h, o

  • drug on the market — Pharmacology. a chemical substance used in the treatment, cure, prevention, or diagnosis of disease or used to otherwise enhance physical or mental well-being.
  • echoencephalograph — a device that employs reflected ultrasonic waves to examine the position of brain structures.
  • economic geography — a branch of geography that deals with the relation of physical and economic conditions to the production and utilization of raw materials and their manufacture into finished products.
  • eggshell porcelain — a type of very thin translucent porcelain originally made in China
  • electrocardiograph — A machine used for electrocardiography.
  • electrophotography — Any of several methods of photocopying in which an image is created and then transferred between surfaces using static electricity.
  • euclid's algorithm — (algorithm)   (Or "Euclidean Algorithm") An algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor (GCD) of two numbers. It relies on the identity gcd(a, b) = gcd(a-b, b) To find the GCD of two numbers by this algorithm, repeatedly replace the larger by subtracting the smaller from it until the two numbers are equal. E.g. 132, 168 -> 132, 36 -> 96, 36 -> 60, 36 -> 24, 36 -> 24, 12 -> 12, 12 so the GCD of 132 and 168 is 12. This algorithm requires only subtraction and comparison operations but can take a number of steps proportional to the difference between the initial numbers (e.g. gcd(1, 1001) will take 1000 steps).
  • exchange programme — an arrangement in which people from different countries visit each other's country, perhaps to strengthen links between them or to improve foreign language skills
  • fall to the ground — (of a plan, theory, etc) to be rendered invalid, esp because of lack of necessary information
  • farm the long acre — to graze cows on the verge of a road
  • fracture toughness — The fracture toughness of a material is how likely it is to resist fracture.
  • gas chromatography — a chromatograph used for the separation of volatile substances.
  • genetic algorithms — genetic algorithm
  • go for the jugular — Anatomy. of or relating to the throat or neck. noting or pertaining to any of certain large veins of the neck, especially one (external jugular vein) collecting blood from the superficial parts of the head or one (internal jugular vein) collecting blood from within the skull.
  • go to the bathroom — use the toilet
  • go with the stream — to conform to the accepted standards
  • grasshopper engine — a steam engine having a piston attached to one end of a beam that is hinged to an upright at the other end, the connecting rod being suspended from near the center of the beam.
  • grease the palm of — to influence by giving money to; bribe
  • greater pichiciego — an armadillo, Burmeisteria retusa, similar to, but larger than, a pichiciego
  • green-backed heron — a small, American heron, Butorides striatus, having glossy green wings.
  • greenhouse warming — the increase in the mean temperature of the earth attributed to the greenhouse effect
  • haemorrhagic fever — any of a group of fevers, such as Ebola virus disease and yellow fever, characterized by internal bleeding or bleeding into the skin
  • hash house slinger — a person who serves in a cheap cafe
  • haulage contractor — a person or firm that transports goods by lorry
  • hell or high water — whatever difficulties may arise
  • hermaphrodite brig — a two-masted sailing vessel, square-rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft-rigged on the mainmast.
  • herring bone weave — a pattern consisting of adjoining vertical rows of slanting lines, any two contiguous lines forming either a V or an inverted V , used in masonry, textiles, embroidery, etc.
  • higher-order macro — A means of expressing certain higher-order functions in a first order language. Proposed by Phil Wadler. Higher-order macros cannot be recursive at the top level but they may contain recursive definitions. E.g. See partial evaluation.
  • histomorphological — histology.
  • historical geology — the branch of geology dealing with the history of the earth.
  • horizontal tasting — a tasting of wines from the same year but from different vineyards, producers, etc.
  • horseless carriage — an automobile: The horse and buggy were eventually replaced by the horseless carriage.
  • human rights group — a group that campaigns for human rights
  • hungarian notation — (language, convention)   A linguistic convention requiring one or more letters to be added to the start of variable names to denote scope and/or type. Hungarian Notation is mainly confined to Microsoft Windows programming environments, such as Microsoft C, C++ and Visual Basic. It was originally devised by Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian, who was a senior programmer at Microsoft for many years. He disliked the way that names in C programs gave no clue as to the type, leading to frequent programmer errors. According to legend, fellow programmers at Microsoft, on seeing the convoluted, vowel-less variable names produced by his scheme, said, "This might as well be in Greek - or even Hungarian!". They made up the name "Hungarian notation" (possibly with "reverse Polish notation" in mind). Hungarian Notation is not really necessary when using a modern strongly-typed language as the compiler warns the programmer if a variable of one type is used as if it were another type. It is less useful in object-oriented programming languages such as C++, where many variables are going to be instances of classes and so begin with "obj". In addition, variable names are essentially only comments, and thus are just as susceptible to becoming out-of-date and incorrect as any other comment. For example, if a signed short int becomes an unsigned long int, the variable name, and every use of it, should be changed to reflect its new type. A variable's name should describe the values it holds. Type and scope are aspects of this, but Hungarian Notation overemphasises their importance by allocating so much of the start of the name to them. Furthermore, type and scope information can be found from the variable's declaration. Ironically, this is particularly easy in the development environments in which Hungarian Notation is typically used.
  • hungry programmers — (body)   A group of programmers producing free software.
  • hypogastric artery — iliac artery (def 3).
  • immunopharmacology — the branch of pharmacology concerned with the immune system
  • james-lange theory — a theory that emotions are caused by bodily sensations; for example, we are sad because we weep
  • johannes gutenberg — Johannes [yoh-hahn-uh s] /yoʊˈhɑn əs/ (Show IPA), (Johann Gensfleisch) c1400–68, German printer: credited with invention of printing from movable type.
  • junior heavyweight — a boxer weighing up to 190 pounds (85.5 kg), between light heavyweight and heavyweight.
  • knight of the road — a tramp
  • lactogenic hormone — prolactin.
  • lagrange's theorem — the theorem that the order of each subgroup of a finite group is a factor of the order of the group.
  • laugh out of court — to express mirth, pleasure, derision, or nervousness with an audible, vocal expulsion of air from the lungs that can range from a loud burst of sound to a series of quiet chuckles and is usually accompanied by characteristic facial and bodily movements.
  • launching ceremony — a ceremony that celebrates the launch of a ship for the first time into the water
  • lithostratigraphic — Of or pertaining to lithostratigraphy.
  • logarithmic spiral — log r = aθ
  • logarithmus dualis — (mathematics)   (ld) Latin for logarithm base two. More commonly written as "log" with a subscript "2". Roughly the number of bits required to represent an integer.
  • lubber grasshopper — plains grasshopper.
  • magic switch story — Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no-one knows who). You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labelled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words "magic" and "more magic". The switch was in the "more magic" position. I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side. It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed. Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the "more magic" position before reviving the computer. A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the "more magic" position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch. The computer promptly crashed. This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since. We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic. I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on "more magic".
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