20-letter words containing a, s, k
- frame check sequence — (communications) (FCS) The extra characters added to a frame for error detection and correction(?). FCS is used in X.25, HDLC, Frame Relay, and other data link layer protocols.
- frederick barbarossa — ("Frederick Barbarossa") 1123?–90, king of Germany 1152–90; king of Italy 1152–90: emperor of the Holy Roman Empire 1152–90.
- frosting on the cake — a sweet mixture, cooked or uncooked, for coating or filling cakes, cookies, and the like; icing.
- get one's hackles up — to become tense with anger; bristle
- go like the clappers — to move extremely fast
- green monkey disease — Marburg disease.
- hang up one's spikes — to retire, as from a professional sport
- hardware handshaking — (communications) A technique for regulating the flow of data across an interface by means of signals carried on separate wires. A common example is the RTS (Request to Send) and CTS (Clear to Send) signals on an EIA-232 serial line. The alternative, software handshaking, uses two special characters inserted into the data stream to carry the same information.
- holy water sprinkler — morning star (def 2).
- honeysuckle ornament — anthemion.
- hudson's bay blanket — a woollen blanket with wide stripes
- interpersonal skills — skills that contribute to dealing successfully with other people
- jack russell terrier — any of a breed of terrier with short hair and a mottled brown and white coat
- japanese honeysuckle — a climbing honeysuckle, Lonicera japonica, introduced into the eastern U.S. from Asia, having fragrant, white flowers that fade to yellow.
- jasper national park — a national park in the Canadian Rockies in W Alberta, in SW Canada.
- jerk someone's chain — to tease, mislead, or harass someone
- kamin's interpreters — (language, tool) A set of interpreters for Pascal, Lisp, APL, Scheme, SASL, CLU, Smalltalk, and Prolog. Tim Budd <[email protected]> implemented them as subclasses in C++ sometime before 1991-09-12.
- kármán vortex street — a regular stream of vortices shed from a body placed in a fluid stream: investigated by Kármán who advanced a formula for the frequency of the shed vortices in terms of the stream velocity and the dimensions of the body
- keep a straight face — look serious, avoid smiling
- keratoconjunctivitis — inflammation of the cornea and conjunctiva.
- keyboard video mouse — (hardware) (KVM) Used to describe a "KVM switch" that allows one keyboard, one video display and one mouse to be switched between two or more computers.
- kick over the traces — either of the two straps, ropes, or chains by which a carriage, wagon, or the like is drawn by a harnessed horse or other draft animal.
- king charles spaniel — a variety of the English toy spaniel having a black-and-tan coat.
- king's-pawn openings — a class of chess openings in which the pawn in front of the king is advanced two squares on the first move.
- kingston upon thames — a borough of Greater London, England.
- knights hospitallers — a military religious order founded about the time of the first crusade (1096–99) among European crusaders. It took its name from a hospital and hostel in Jerusalem
- know all the answers — be opinionated
- like a dose of salts — very quickly indeed
- like a house on fire — If two people get on like a house on fire, they quickly become close friends, for example because they have many interests in common.
- like a ton of bricks — (used esp of the manner of punishing or reprimanding someone) with great force; severely
- 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.
- make eyes at someone — If you make eyes at someone, you look at them in a way which shows that you find them attractive and which is intended to get their attention.
- make goo-goo eyes at — to look at (someone) in a sentimental and embarrassing way
- make love to someone — to have sexual intercourse with someone
- make sheep's eyes at — to look shyly but amorously at
- make short shrift of — to dispose of quickly and unsympathetically
- make the most of sth — take advantage
- megakaryocytopoiesis — (biology) The cellular development process that leads to platelet production.
- 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.
- 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
- monkey on one's back — any mammal of the order Primates, including the guenons, macaques, langurs, and capuchins, but excluding humans, the anthropoid apes, and, usually, the tarsier and prosimians. Compare New World monkey, Old World monkey.
- multistorey car park — a car park consisting of several levels
- near-market research — scientific research that, while not linked to the development of a specific product, is likely to be commercially exploitable
- network transparency — (networking) A feature of an operating system or other service which lets the user access a remote resource through a network without having to know if the resource is remote or local. For example NFS allow users to access remote files as if they were local files.
- neuromusculoskeletal — (medicine) Describing the interactions between nerves, muscles and the skeleton.
- 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.
- nikkei stock average — an index of prices on the Tokyo Stock Exchange
- no lack of something — If you say there is no lack of something, you are emphasizing that there is a great deal of it.
- packed like sardines — If you say that a crowd of people are packed like sardines, you are emphasizing that they are sitting or standing so close together that they cannot move easily.
- parkinson's syndrome — a complex of symptoms indistinguishable from Parkinson's disease, commonly affecting boxers or sometimes occurring as a result of substance abuse or an encephalitic infection.