21-letter words containing a, t, h
- light armored vehicle — an eight-wheeled armored reconnaissance car with a 25mm cannon, in service with the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in the 1980s.
- linear graph notation — (LGN) A linearised representation of TCOL trees.
- live to tell the tale — If you survive a dangerous or frightening experience and so are able to tell people about it afterwards, you can say that you lived to tell the tale.
- lose one's heart (to) — to fall in love (with)
- lotus of the good law — Saddharma-Pundarika.
- lotus-of-the-true-law — a Mahayana sutra, forming with its references to Amida and the Bodhisattvas the basis for the doctrine that there is something of Buddha in everyone, so that salvation is universally available: a central text of Mahayana Buddhism.
- macintosh common lisp — (language) (MCL) Common Lisp for the Apple Macintosh. Guillaume Cartier, of the Mathematics Department at UQAM, Canada, has written some libraries.
- macintosh file system — (file system) A file on the Macintosh consists of two parts, called forks. The "data fork" contains the data which would normally be stored in the file on other operating systems. The "resource fork" contains a collection of arbitrary attribute/value pairs, including program segments, icon bitmaps, and parametric values. Yet more information regarding Macintosh files is stored by the Finder in a hidden file, called the "Desktop Database". Because of the complications in storing different parts of a Macintosh file in non-Macintosh file systems that only handle consecutive data in one part, it is common to only send the Data fork or to convert the Macintosh file into some other format before transferring it.
- 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.
- maître d'hôtel butter — melted butter mixed with parsley and lemon juice
- majority shareholding — a holding of more than half a company's shares
- make (both) ends meet — to manage to keep one's expenses within one's income
- make heavy weather of — to create needless difficulties in dealing with
- make one's peace with — the normal, nonwarring condition of a nation, group of nations, or the world.
- make yourself at home — settle in
- maryland yellowthroat — (in former systems of nomenclature) the common yellowthroat, Geothlypis trichas, especially the eastern U.S. subspecies.
- mauvais quart d'heure — a brief unpleasant experience
- maximum value theorem — the theorem that for a real-valued function f whose domain is a compact set, there is at least one element x in the domain of f for which f (x) achieves its largest value.
- mechanical instrument — a musical instrument, such as a barrel organ or music box, that plays a preselected piece of music by mechanical means
- mechanical metallurgy — the branch of metallurgy dealing with the response of metals to applied forces.
- mechanical solidarity — social cohesiveness that is based on shared activities, beliefs, and experiences and is characteristic of simple traditional societies.
- mechanical weathering — any of the various weathering processes that cause physical disintegration of exposed rock without any change in the chemical composition of the rock: Collision between rock surfaces can cause mechanical weathering.
- megaspore mother cell — a diploid cell in plants that undergoes meiosis to create four haploid megaspores.
- mengistu haile mariam — born 1937, Ethiopian political leader: head of state 1977–87; president 1987–91.
- methylisothiazolinone — (chemistry) A powerful biocide and preservative within the group of isothiazolinones, used in shampoos etc.
- miniature photography — photography with a camera using film that is 35 millimeters wide or less.
- modern apprenticeship — an arrangement that allows a school leaver to gain vocational qualifications while being trained in a job
- monochloroacetic acid — chloroacetic acid.
- mother-of-pearl cloud — nacreous cloud.
- mother-of-pearl glass — an American art glassware having colored glass set into indentations in a thickness of opaque glass, the whole covered with clear glass and etched slightly with acid.
- 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.
- move heaven and earth — the abode of God, the angels, and the spirits of the righteous after death; the place or state of existence of the blessed after the mortal life.
- 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
- near-death experience — A near-death experience is a strange experience that some people who have nearly died say they had when they were unconscious.
- neither hide nor hair — nothing whatsoever
- 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.
- no less a person than — a person of no lower importance, rank, etc. than
- no/nothing other than — You use nothing other than and no other than when you are going to mention a course of action, decision, or description and emphasize that it is the only one possible in the situation.
- north atlantic treaty — the treaty (1949) signed by 12 countries, providing for the establishment of NATO.
- north east new guinea — the NE part of the former Australian Territory of New Guinea; now part of Papua New Guinea.
- north pacific current — a warm current flowing eastward across the Pacific Ocean.
- 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.
- not a patch on sb/sth — If you say that someone or something is not a patch on another person or thing, you mean that they are not as good as that person or thing.
- not care a hang about — to not care the least bit about
- not hold one's breath — If you say that you won't hold your breath, you mean that you do not expect something to happen even though someone has suggested that it might.
- nothing in particular — not anything specific
- of time and the river — a novel (1935) by Thomas Wolfe.