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18-letter words containing a, s, y, m

  • honeysuckle family — the plant family Caprifoliaceae, typified by shrubs and woody vines having opposite leaves, clusters of usually flaring, narrow, tubular flowers, and various types of fruit, and including the elder, honeysuckle, snowberry, twinflower, and viburnum.
  • hungry programmers — (body)   A group of programmers producing free software.
  • hydroxytryptamines — Plural form of hydroxytryptamine.
  • hyperaldosteronism — aldosteronism.
  • hypercholesteremia — Alternative spelling of hypercholesteraemia.
  • hypoparathyroidism — Diminished concentration of parathyroid hormone in the blood, which causes deficiencies of calcium and phosphorus compounds in the blood and results in muscular spasms.
  • in company with sb — If you feel, believe, or know something in company with someone else, you both feel, believe, or know it.
  • incommensurability — not commensurable; having no common basis, measure, or standard of comparison.
  • indiscriminatingly — In an indiscriminating manner.
  • information system — a computer system or set of components for collecting, creating, storing, processing, and distributing information, typically including hardware and software, system users, and the data itself: the use of information systems to solve business problems.
  • infrared astronomy — the study of infrared radiation emitted by celestial objects.
  • investment analyst — a specialist in forecasting the prices of stocks and shares
  • investment company — a company that invests its funds in other companies and issues its own securities against these investments.
  • involuntary muscle — muscle: contracts involuntarily
  • isoamyl salicylate — a colorless, sometimes slightly yellow, synthetic oil, C 12 H 16 O 3 , having an orchidlike odor: used in perfumery.
  • james-lange theory — a theory that emotions are caused by bodily sensations; for example, we are sad because we weep
  • jerusalem syndrome — a delusive condition affecting some visitors to Jerusalem in which the sufferer identifies with a major figure from his or her religious background
  • lay down your arms — If soldiers lay down their arms, they stop fighting and give up their weapons.
  • literary criticism — study and review of literature
  • loosestrife family — the plant family Lythraceae, characterized by herbaceous plants, shrubs, and trees having usually opposite or whorled, simple leaves, clusters of flowers, and fruit in the form of a capsule, and including the crape myrtle, loosestrifes of the genus Lythrum, and the henna shrub.
  • 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".
  • magnetocrystalline — (physics) Describing the interaction between the magnetization and the crystal structure of a material.
  • magnetogasdynamics — magnetohydrodynamics.
  • many happy returns — When it is someone's birthday, people sometimes say 'Many happy returns' to them as a way of greeting them.
  • marketing strategy — a general plan or set of plans dealing with marketing, especially over a long period
  • maternity hospital — birthing facility
  • metabolic syndrome — Pathology. a group of medical conditions present simultaneously in a patient, as high blood pressure, low HDL cholesterol levels, and an excess of abdominal fat, that increases a person's risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Also called insulin resistance syndrome.
  • methacrylate resin — an acrylic resin formed by polymerizing the esters or amides of methacrylic acid.
  • methyl transferase — any of a class of enzymes that catalyze the transfer of methyl groups from one molecule to another.
  • methylated spirits — ethyl alcohol denatured with methyl alcohol for the purpose of preventing its use as an alcoholic beverage.
  • microcrystallinity — The condition of being microcrystalline.
  • minimally invasive — (of medical treatments or procedures) requiring only a small incision or the insertion of an instrument into a body cavity; involving minimal damage of body tissue: minimally invasive endoscopy.
  • mobile data system — a system consisting of a client computer requesting information and a server supplying this information
  • monophosphorylated — (biochemistry) phosphorylated with a single unit of phosphoric acid.
  • mucopolysaccharide — (formerly) glycosaminoglycan.
  • muscular dystrophy — a hereditary disease characterized by gradual wasting of the muscles with replacement by scar tissue and fat, sometimes also affecting the heart.
  • music to your ears — If something that you hear is music to your ears, it makes you feel very happy.
  • mutual aid society — A mutual aid society is an organization that provides benefits or other help to its members when they are affected by things such as death, sickness, disability, old age, or unemployment.
  • mutually exclusive — of or relating to a situation involving two or more events, possibilities, etc., in which the occurrence of one precludes the occurrence of the other: mutually exclusive plans of action.
  • mutually recursive — recursion
  • my lips are sealed — If you tell someone that your lips are sealed, you are promising them that you will keep a secret that they have told you.
  • neo-pythagoreanism — a philosophical system, established in Alexandria and Rome in the second century b.c., consisting mainly of revived Pythagorean doctrines with elements of Platonism and Stoicism.
  • neuropsychodynamic — Of or pertaining to neuropsychodynamics.
  • neutrino astronomy — the branch of astronomy dealing with the detection and measurement of neutrinos emitted by the sun and other celestial objects.
  • new storage system — (storage)   (NSS) A major Multics implementation project during the 1970s. The initial Multics file system design had evolved from the one-huge-disk world of CTSS. When multiple disk units were used they were just assigned increasing ranges of disk addresses, so a segment could have pages scattered over all disks on the system. This provided good I/O parallelism but made crash recovery expensive. NSS redesigned the lower levels of the file system, introducing the concepts of logical volume and physical volume and a mapping from a Multics directory branch to a VTOC entry for each file. The new system had much better recovery performance in exchange for a small space and performance cost.
  • normally aspirated — A normally aspirated or naturally aspirated engine breathes air at atmospheric pressure.
  • numerical analysis — the branch of mathematics dealing with methods for obtaining approximate numerical solutions of mathematical problems.
  • ovariohysterectomy — Surgical removal of the ovaries and uterus.
  • payment by results — a system of wage payment whereby all or part of the wage varies systematically according to the level of work performance of an employee
  • people's democracy — (in Communist ideology) a country or form of government in transition from bourgeois democracy to socialism. In this stage there is more than one class, the largest being the proletariat, led by the Communist Party, which is therefore the dominant power
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