21-letter words containing a, s, t, r, i, n
- learning difficulties — difficulty experienced in reaching the average standard of people of the same age group as regards intellectual and cognitive skills and performance
- leave sb in the lurch — If someone leaves you in the lurch, they go away or stop helping you at a very difficult time.
- lie at someone's door — a movable, usually solid, barrier for opening and closing an entranceway, cupboard, cabinet, or the like, commonly turning on hinges or sliding in grooves.
- linear transformation — linear map
- liquefied natural gas — a mixture of various gases, esp methane, liquefied under pressure for transportation and used as an engine fuel
- long-term liabilities — Long-term liabilities are debts that a company does not have to pay back for a year or more.
- magnesium trisilicate — a white, fine, odorless and tasteless powder, Mg 2 O 8 Si 3 ⋅nH 2 O, used industrially to absorb odors and decolorize and pharmaceutically as an antacid.
- maidenhair spleenwort — an evergreen fern, Asplenium trichomanes, abundant in woody areas of the North Temperate Zone, having thickly clustered fronds.
- main-topsail schooner — a two-masted or three-masted schooner having square topsails on the foremast and mainmast: a jackass brig or jackass bark.
- majority shareholding — a holding of more than half a company's shares
- manufacturing process — chain of production
- marine superintendent — a person who is responsible for the maintenance of the vessels of a shipping line, for their docking and the handling of cargo, and for the hiring of personnel for deck departments.
- mean square deviation — variance (def 3).
- mechanical instrument — a musical instrument, such as a barrel organ or music box, that plays a preselected piece of music by mechanical means
- mechanical solidarity — social cohesiveness that is based on shared activities, beliefs, and experiences and is characteristic of simple traditional societies.
- medium access control — Media Access Control
- mengistu haile mariam — born 1937, Ethiopian political leader: head of state 1977–87; president 1987–91.
- meter-kilogram-second — of or relating to the system of units in which the meter, kilogram, and second are the principal units of length, mass, and time. Abbreviation: mks, MKS.
- metropolitan district — any of the districts making up the metropolitan counties of England: since 1986 they have functioned as unitary authorities, forming the sole principal tier of local government. Each metropolitan district has an elected council responsible for education, social services, etc
- microsoft corporation — (company) The biggest supplier of operating systems and other software for IBM PC compatibles. Software products include MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Windows NT, Microsoft Access, LAN Manager, MS Client, SQL Server, Open Data Base Connectivity (ODBC), MS Mail, and SNA Server for Windows NT. Microsoft was founded as "Micro-soft" in 1975 by Bill Gates (now CEO) and his high school pal Paul Allen. Their first product was a version of BASIC for the new Altair computer [which one?]. In 1980, IBM chose Microsoft to supply the operating system for the IBM PC. On the UK television program "The Net" in May 1994, Bill Gates said he was betting his company on the information highway". Quarterly sales $1293M, profits $362M (Aug 1994).
- modern apprenticeship — an arrangement that allows a school leaver to gain vocational qualifications while being trained in a job
- motherwell and wishaw — a burgh in the Motherwell district, in S Scotland.
- motivational research — the application of the knowledge and techniques of the social sciences, especially psychology and sociology, to understanding consumer attitudes and behavior: used as a guide in advertising and marketing.
- motor neurone disease — Motor neurone disease is a disease which destroys the part of a person's nervous system that controls movement.
- multichannel analyser — an electronic instrument, such as a pulse height analyser, that splits an input waveform into a large number of channels in accordance with a particular parameter of the input
- multiplex transmitter — a transmitter that sends signals by multiplex
- national park service — a division of the Department of the Interior, created in 1916, that administers national parks, monuments, historic sites, and recreational areas.
- naturalization papers — documents confirming that someone has been awarded citizenship of a country he or she was not born in
- necrotising fasciitis — a disease caused by the bacterium streptococcus pyogenes, in which the fasciae of the muscles or other organs become inflamed, resulting in rapid destruction of overlying tissues
- negative prescription — the barring of adverse claims to property, etc, after a specified period of time has elapsed, allowing the possessor to acquire title
- negotiable instrument — order or promise to pay money
- negotiable securities — securities that are legally transferable in title from one party to another
- network administrator — (job) A person who manages a communications network within an organisation. Responsibilities include network security, installing new applications, distributing software upgrades, monitoring daily activity, enforcing licensing agreements, developing a storage management program and providing for routine backups.
- new year's resolution — If you make a New Year's resolution, you make a decision at the beginning of a year to start doing something or to stop doing something.
- night storage heating — a system of heating which uses a heater or radiator that stores heat at night-time because electricity is cheaper
- nightmare file system — Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher spl level). Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the entire network of machines is frozen - worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great misfeature). ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s. See also broadcast storm.
- nitrosylsulfuric acid — a clear, straw-colored, oily, corrosive liquid, HNO 5 S, used chiefly in the manufacture of dyes.
- nominative of address — a noun naming the person to whom one is speaking.
- nonexamination course — a course of study in which there are no examinations
- nonrestrictive clause — a relative clause that describes or supplements but is not essential in establishing the identity of the antecedent and is usually set off by commas in English. In This year, which has been dry, is bad for crops the clause which has been dry is a nonrestrictive clause.
- nonviolent resistance — passive resistance, peaceful protest
- north east new guinea — the NE part of the former Australian Territory of New Guinea; now part of Papua New Guinea.
- northumberland strait — the part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence that separates Prince Edward Island from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in SE Canada. About 200 miles (320 km) long; 9–30 miles (15–48 km) wide.
- nuclear cross section — cross section (def 7).
- nuclear power station — a station or plant where nuclear energy is converted into heat, electricity, etc
- observation satellite — an unmanned satellite that observes the earth and gathers data
- oil-in-water emulsion — An oil-in-water emulsion is a mixture in which an oily medicine is dispersed in water or other liquid.
- old spanish practices — irregular practices among a group of workers to gain increased financial allowances, reduced working hours, etc
- on o's best behaviour — If someone is on their best behaviour, they are trying very hard to behave well.
- operational semantics — (theory) A set of rules specifying how the state of an actual or hypothetical computer changes while executing a program. The overall state is typically divided into a number of components, e.g. stack, heap, registers etc. Each rule specifies certain preconditions on the contents of some components and their new contents after the application of the rule. It is similar in spirit to the notion of a Turing machine, in which actions are precisely described in a mathematical way. Compuare axiomatic semantics, denotational semantics.