14-letter words containing a, s, c, o, m, y
- saccharomycete — a single-celled yeast of the family Saccharomycetaceae, having no mycelium.
- sceuophylacium — a place where sacred vessels are kept
- scratch monkey — (humour) As in "Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey", a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise get trashed. This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a biological research program at the University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when a DEC engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel. It is reported that, after calming down an understandably irate customer sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC troubleshooter called up the field circus manager responsible and asked him sweetly, "Can you swim?" Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain clueless droids at the local "humane" society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a scratch monkey. A corespondent adds: The details you give are somewhat consistent with the version I recall from the Digital "War Stories" notesfile, but the name "Mabel" and the swimming bit were not mentioned, IIRC. Also, there's a very detailed account that claims that three monkies died in the incident, not just one. I believe Eric Postpischil wrote the original story at DEC, so his coming back with a different version leads me to wonder whether there ever was a real Scratch Monkey incident.
- secondary beam — a beam of particles of one kind selected from the group of particles produced when a beam of particles from an accelerator (primary beam) strikes a target.
- semiofficially — in a semiofficial manner
- semiologically — in a semiological manner; in a way that pertains to semiology
- ship's company — company (def 11).
- sockeye salmon — an important food fish, Oncorhynchus nerka, inhabiting the North Pacific.
- sodium cyanide — a white, crystalline, deliquescent, water-soluble, poisonous powder, NaCN, prepared by heating sodium amide with charcoal: used chiefly in casehardening alloys, in the leaching and flotation of ore, and in electroplating.
- sycamore maple — a maple, Acer pseudoplatanus, of Europe and western Asia, having gray bark and opposite, lobed leaves: grown as a shade tree.
- syntactic foam — any of several buoyant materials made up of tiny hollow spheres embedded in a surrounding plastic
- thermodynamics — the science concerned with the relations between heat and mechanical energy or work, and the conversion of one into the other: modern thermodynamics deals with the properties of systems for the description of which temperature is a necessary coordinate.
- thymelaeaceous — of, relating to, or belonging to the Thymelaeaceae, a family of trees and shrubs having tough acrid bark and simple leaves: includes spurge laurel, leatherwood, and mezereon
- trachyspermous — having seeds with a rough coat.
- unaccustomedly — in an unaccustomed manner
- yeoman service — excellent service