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22-letter words containing a, s, t, r

  • java community process — (project)   (JCP) An organization controlled by Sun Microsystems to further the growth of the Java language and runtime. The JCP produces standards called Java Standard Requests, which are "requests" in the same sense as RFCs.
  • junior sales associate — A junior sales associate is an inexperienced member of the sales staff, usually receiving training or supervised by more experienced staff.
  • just around the corner — in the next street
  • justification by works — the belief that a person becomes just before God by the performance of good works: the doctrine against which Luther protested in inaugurating the Protestant Reformation.
  • keep a stiff upper lip — either of the two fleshy parts or folds forming the margins of the mouth and functioning in speech.
  • label switching router — (networking)   (LSR) A device that typically resides somewhere in the middle of a network and is capable of forwarding datagrams by label switching. In many cases, especially early versions of MPLS networks, a LSR will typically be a modified ATM switch that forwards datagrams based upon a label in the VPI/VCI field.
  • lady's not for burning — a verse play (1948) by Christopher Fry.
  • land of the rising sun — Japan.
  • landscape architecture — the art of arranging or modifying the features of a landscape, an urban area, etc., for aesthetic or practical reasons.
  • league of women voters — a nonpartisan organization that works toward improving the political process: created in 1920 to inform women on public issues. Abbreviation: LWV.
  • leather-stocking tales — a series of historical novels by James Fenimore Cooper, comprising The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
  • lesser cornstalk borer — the larva of a widely distributed pyralid moth, Elasmopalpus lignosellus, that damages corn and some other crops by boring into the part of the stalk close to the soil.
  • let sth drop/fall/slip — If you let drop, let fall, or let slip information, you reveal it casually or by accident, during a conversation about something else.
  • lethargic encephalitis — sleeping sickness (def 2).
  • liquid crystal display — (hardware)   (LCD) An electro-optical device used to display digits, characters or images, commonly used in digital watches, calculators, and portable computers. The heart of the liquid crystal display is a piece of liquid crystal material placed between a pair of transparent electrodes. The liquid crystal changes the phase of the light passing through it and this phase change can be controlled by the voltage applied between the electrodes. If such a unit is placed between a pair of plane polariser plates then light can pass through it only if the correct voltage is applied. Liquid crystal displays are formed by integrating a number of such cells, or more usually, by using a single liquid crystal plate and a pattern of electrodes. The simplest kind of liquid crystal displays, those used in digital watches and calculators, contain a common electrode plane covering one side and a pattern of electrodes on the other. These electrodes can be individually controlled to produce the appropriate display. Computer displays, however, require far too many pixels (typically between 50,000 and several millions) to make this scheme, in particular its wiring, feasible. The electrodes are therefore replaced by a number of row electrodes on one side and column electrodes on the other. By applying voltage to one row and several columns the pixels at the intersections are set. The pixels being set one row after the other, in passive matrix displays the number of rows is limited by the ratio of the setting and fading times. In the setup described above (known as "twisted nematic") the number of rows is limited to about 20. Using an alternative "supertwisted nematic" setup VGA quality displays (480 rows) can be easily built. As of 1995 most notebook computers used this technique. Fading can be slowed by putting an active element, such as a transistor, on the top of each pixel. This "remembers" the setting of that pixel. These active matrix displays are of much better quality (as good as CRTs) but are much more expensive than the passive matrix displays. LCDs are slimmer, lighter and consume less power than the previous dominant display type, the cathode ray tube, hence their importance for portable computers.
  • little st bernard pass — a pass over the Savoy Alps, between Bourg-Saint-Maurice, France, and La Thuile, Italy: 11th-century hospice. Height: 2187 m (7177 ft)
  • local standard of rest — a frame of reference for a portion of the universe in which the mean motion of nearby stars is zero.
  • lofoten and vesterålen — a group of islands off the NW coast of Norway, within the Arctic Circle. Largest island: Hinnøy. Pop: 54 589 (2004 est). Area: about 5130 sq km (1980 sq miles)
  • lord justice of appeal — an ordinary judge of the Court of Appeal
  • lorentz transformation — the mathematical transformation in the special theory of relativity that describes the way in which measurements of space, time, and other physical quantities differ for two observers in uniform relative motion.
  • love-hate relationship — If you have a love-hate relationship with someone or something, your feelings towards them change suddenly and often from love to hate.
  • lund software house ab — (company)   The company who produced Lund Simula. Address: Box 7056, S-22007 Lund, Sweden.
  • lynx real-time systems — A company in Los Gatos, California who distribute LynxOS. E-mail: <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>. Address: 16780 Lark Avenue, Los Gatos, CA 95030, USA. Telephone:: +1 (408) 354 7770, +1 (800) 255 LYNX. Fax: +1 (408) 354 7085.
  • magnetic pole strength — Electricity. a measure of the force exerted by one face of a magnet on a face of another magnet when both magnets are represented by equal and opposite poles. Symbol: m.
  • make a beeline for sth — If you make a beeline for a place, you go to it as quickly and directly as possible.
  • make a clean breast of — Anatomy, Zoology. (in bipeds) the outer, front part of the thorax, or the front part of the body from the neck to the abdomen; chest.
  • make one's mouth water — a transparent, odorless, tasteless liquid, a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, H 2 O, freezing at 32°F or 0°C and boiling at 212°F or 100°C, that in a more or less impure state constitutes rain, oceans, lakes, rivers, etc.: it contains 11.188 percent hydrogen and 88.812 percent oxygen, by weight.
  • make/prove one's point — If you make your point or prove your point, you prove that something is true, either by arguing about it or by your actions or behaviour.
  • manuel estrada cabrera — Manuel [mah-nwel] /mɑˈnwɛl/ (Show IPA), 1857–1924, Guatemalan politician: president 1898–1920.
  • manufacturing industry — the industry of manufacturing goods from raw materials
  • master warrant officer — a noncommissioned officer in the Canadian forces junior to a chief warrant officer
  • matrix math extensions — (processor)   (MMX) (NOT an acronym for "MultiMedia eXtension", according to Intel, but an Intel brand name) A set of 57 extra instructions built into some versions of Intel's Pentium microprocessors for supporting SIMD operations on multimedia and communications data types. MMX-enhanced processors are due to be released early in 1997. They will be fully compatible with previous Intel processors and software but software will only benefit if it is written to use the new instructions. They can handle many common multimedia operations, such as digital signal processing, normally handled by a separate sound card or video card.
  • message transfer agent — (messaging)   (MTA, Mail Transfer Agent) Any program responsible for delivering e-mail messages. Upon receiving a message from a Mail User Agent or another MTA, often by SMTP over the Internet, it stores it temporarily locally and analyses the recipients and delivers it to any local addressees and/or forwards it to other remote MTAs (routing) for delivery to remote recipients. In either case it may edit and/or add to the message headers. The most widely used MTA for Unix is sendmail, which communicates using SMTP.
  • metasyntactic variable — (grammar)   Strictly, a variable used in metasyntax, but often used for any name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The word foo is the canonical example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use "foo" or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a metasyntactic-variable name is a scratch file that may be deleted at any time. To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a cultural signature. They occur both in series (used for related groups of variables or objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures: bazola, ztesch: Stanford (from mid-'70s on). zxc, spqr, wombat: Cambridge University (England). shme: Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/. blarg, wibble: New Zealand Of all these, only "foo" and "bar" are universal (and baz nearly so). The compounds foobar and "foobaz" also enjoy very wide currency. Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; barf and mumble, for example. See also Commonwealth Hackish for discussion of numerous metasyntactic variables found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.
  • microwave spectroscopy — the determination of those frequencies of the microwave spectrum that are selectively absorbed by certain materials, providing information about atomic, molecular, and crystalline structure.
  • middle-distance runner — someone who runs races of a length between the sprints and the distance events, esp the 800 metres and the 1500 metres
  • miscarriage of justice — law: wrongful judgement
  • molecular distillation — a vacuum distillation in which the molecules of the distillate reach the condenser before colliding with one another.
  • mother carey's chicken — any of various small petrels, especially the stormy petrel, Oceanites oceanicus.
  • mountain standard time — one of the standard times used in North America, seven hours behind Greenwich Mean Time
  • multiplicative inverse — reciprocal (def 9).
  • mutton dressed as lamb — If you describe a woman as mutton dressed as lamb, you are criticizing her for trying to look younger than she really is, in a way that you consider unattractive.
  • name service switching — Domain Name System
  • nassella tussock board — one of many local statutory organizations set up in different regions of New Zealand to eradicate the invasive nassella tussock weed
  • national semiconductor — (company)   A semiconductor manufacturer, responsible for the SC/MP, National Semiconductor 16000 and National Semiconductor 32000 series of microprocessors.
  • natural classification — classification of organisms according to relationships based on descent from a common ancestor
  • netherlands new guinea — a former name of Irian Jaya.
  • new zealand greenstone — a variety of nephrite from New Zealand, used as a gemstone
  • no room to swing a cat — If you say 'There's no room to swing a cat' or 'You can't swing a cat', you mean that the place you are talking about is very small or crowded.
  • nominal semidestructor — (abuse)   Slang for "National Semiconductor", found among other places in the 4.3BSD networking sources. During the late 1970s to mid-1980s this company marketed a series of microprocessors including the National Semiconductor 16000 and National Semiconductor 32000. At one point early in the great microprocessor race, the specs on these chips made them look like serious competition for the rising Intel 80x86 and Motorola 680x0 series. Unfortunately, the actual parts were notoriously flaky and never implemented the full instruction set promised in their literature, apparently because the company couldn't get any of the mask steppings to work as designed. They eventually sank without trace, joining the Zilog Z8000 and a few even more obscure also-rans in the graveyard of forgotten microprocessors.
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