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25-letter words containing a, t, r, i, l

  • marcus aurelius antoninus — Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius.
  • marcus-valerius-martialis — (Marcus Valerius Martialis) a.d. 43?–104? Roman epigrammatist, born in Spain.
  • medical officer of health — a person appointed by a local or national authority to be in charge of its health policy
  • metal oxide semiconductor — a three-layer sandwich of a metal, an insulator (usually an oxide of the substrate), and a semiconductor substrate, used in integrated circuits. Abbreviation: MOS.
  • metal-free phthalocyanine — phthalocyanine (def 1).
  • methylrosaniline chloride — gentian violet.
  • metropolitan area network — (MAN) A data network intended to serve an area the size of a large city. Such networks are being implemented by innovative techniques, such as running optical fibre through subway tunnels. A popular example of a MAN is SMDS. See also Local Area Network, Wide Area Network.
  • minimal brain dysfunction — (no longer in technical use) attention deficit disorder.
  • mount kenya national park — a national park in Kenya, located in the regions of Mount Kenya that are above 3200 m (10 500 ft); now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the park covers 1420 sq km (548 sq miles)
  • multi-scene control board — preset board.
  • multinational corporation — international business
  • my favourite toy language — (jargon, language)   (MFTL) Describes a talk on a programming language design that is heavy on syntax (with lots of BNF), sometimes even talks about semantics (e.g. type systems), but rarely, if ever, has any content (see content-free). More broadly applied to talks - even when the topic is not a programming language --- in which the subject matter is gone into in unnecessary and meticulous detail at the sacrifice of any conceptual content. "Well, it was a typical MFTL talk". 2. A language about which the developers are passionate (often to the point of prosyletic zeal) but no one else cares about. Applied to the language by those outside the originating group. "He cornered me about type resolution in his MFTL." The first great goal in the mind of the designer of an MFTL is usually to write a compiler for it, then bootstrap the design away from contamination by lesser languages by writing a compiler for it in itself. Thus, the standard put-down question at an MFTL talk is "Has it been used for anything besides its own compiler?". On the other hand, a language that *cannot* be used to write its own compiler is beneath contempt. See break-even point, toolsmith.
  • national enterprise board — a public corporation established in 1975 to help the economy of the UK. In 1981 it merged with the National Research and Development Council to form the British Technology Group
  • national insurance number — a number allocated to UK citizens so that they can pay national insurance
  • national liberation front — the name taken by nationalist insurgent groups in various countries.
  • national portrait gallery — an art gallery in London, established in 1856, displaying portraits and photographs of eminent figures in British history
  • national security council — the council, composed of the president, vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that determines means by which domestic, foreign, and military policy can best be integrated for safeguarding the national security. Abbreviation: NSC.
  • national unity government — a government formed by a coalition of parties, esp in time of national emergency
  • neurocirculatory asthenia — cardiac neurosis.
  • never do things by halves — If you say that someone never does things by halves, you mean that they always do things very thoroughly.
  • non-algorithmic procedure — heuristic
  • normal equivalent deviate — a value x such that the integral of a normal curve over all those values of the independent variable less than x is equal to the given probability.
  • northern corn-leaf blight — northern leaf blight.
  • nuffield teaching project — (in Britain) a complete school programme in mathematics, science, languages, etc, with suggested complementary theory and practical work
  • object relational mapping — (programming, database)   (ORM) The software development activity that defines a correspondence between objects in a program and rows in a database table. Atomic object properties correspond to columns in the table, non-atomic data types and relations between objects are represented as foreign keys referring to other tables. An object persistence mechanism is responsible for maintaining the correspondence between objects and the database contents at run-time.
  • observational equivalence — Two terms M and N are observationally equivalent iff for all contexts C[] where C[M] is a valid term, C[N] is also a valid term with the same value.
  • on the horns of a dilemma — one of the bony, permanent, hollow paired growths, often curved and pointed, that project from the upper part of the head of certain ungulate mammals, as cattle, sheep, goats, or antelopes.
  • open educational resource — Usually, open educational resources. a piece of content or a tool for teaching or learning, often developed online, that is made available free of charge for anyone to use, revise, adapt, or redistribute. Abbreviation: OER.
  • ordinary national diploma — a vocational qualification in England and Wales and Northern Ireland. It is the highest level of the BTEC structure and is equal to A-Levels
  • organizational psychology — the study of the structure of an organization and of the ways in which the people in it interact, usually undertaken in order to improve the organization
  • own or similar occupation — A policyholder's own or similar occupation is the job that they were doing before they became disabled or a job with similar duties and training.
  • oxidative phosphorylation — the aerobic synthesis, coupled to electron transport, of ATP from phosphate and ADP.
  • page description language — a high-level programming language for determining the output of a page printer designed to work with it, independent of the printer's internal codes. Abbreviation: PDL.
  • party political broadcast — A party political broadcast is a short broadcast on radio or television made by a political party, especially before an election. It explains their views and often criticizes other political parties.
  • pci configuration utility — (tool)   (PCU) A piece of software for configuring a specific PCI hardware device.
  • peripheral nervous system — the portion of the nervous system lying outside the brain and spinal cord.
  • permanent virtual circuit — (networking)   (PVC, or in ATM terminology, "Permanent Virtual Connection") A virtual circuit that is permanently established, saving the time associated with circuit establishment and tear-down.
  • personal flotation device — a life preserver, life jacket, or other device for keeping a person afloat in the water. Abbreviation: PFD.
  • personal-opinion telegram — a type of domestic telegram sent at the lowest rate with a minimum charge for 20 words or less to elected federal or state officials on a subject of national or regional interest.
  • personalized number plate — a car registration plate that has the owner's initials or name on it
  • petropavlovsk-kamchatskiy — seaport in E Asian Russia, on Kamchatka Peninsula: pop. 210,000
  • point-and-drool interface — (abuse)   (Or "point-and-grunt interface") A parody of "point-and-shoot interface", describing a windows, icons, and mouse-based (WIMP) graphical user interface. The implication, of course, is that such an interface is only suitable for idiots. See for the rest of us, WIMP, drool-proof paper.
  • polycystic ovary syndrome — a hormonal disorder in which the Graafian follicles in the ovary fail to develop completely so that they are unable to ovulate, remaining as multiple cysts that distend the ovary. The results can include reduced fertility, obesity, and hirsutism
  • polymerase chain reaction — a technique in which a known DNA sequence is synthesized at high temperatures by means of a polymerase, producing millions of copies for statistical analysis: used in DNA fingerprinting, in detecting minute quantities of cancer cells, etc.
  • polynomial-time algorithm — (complexity)   A known algorithm (or Turing Machine) that is guaranteed to terminate within a number of steps which is a polynomial function of the size of the problem. See also computational complexity, exponential time, nondeterministic polynomial-time (NP), NP-complete.
  • portable network graphics — (file format)   /ping/ (PNG) An extensible file format for the lossless, portable, well-compressed storage of raster images. PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF. Indexed-colour, greyscale and truecolour images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel. Sample depths range from 1 to 16 bits. PNG is designed for on-line viewing applications, such as the World Wide Web, so it is fully streamable with a progressive display option. PNG is robust, providing both full file integrity checking and simple detection of common transmission errors. Also, PNG can store gamma correction and chromaticity data for improved colour matching on heterogeneous platforms.
  • positional representation — (mathematics)   The conventional way of writing numbers as a string of digits in which each digit, D, has value D * R^I, where R is the radix or (number) base and I is the digit's position counting leftward from zero at the least significant (right-hand) end. Each digit can be zero to R-1. Each position has a weight or significance R times greater than the position to its right and the right-most place has a weight of one. Decimal numbers are radix ten, binary numbers are radix two, octal radix eight and hexadecimal radix 16. Positional representation makes arithmetic operations on large numbers much easier than, say, roman numerals. It is fundamental to the binary representation used by digital computers.
  • primary domain controller — (networking)   (PDC) Each Windows NT domain has a Primary Domain Controller and zero or more Backup Domain Controllers. The PDC holds the SAM database and authenticates access requests from workstations and servers in the domain.
  • principle of least action — the principle that motion between any two points in a conservative dynamical system is such that the action has a minimum value with respect to all paths between the points that correspond to the same energy
  • principle of virtual work — the principle that the total work done by all forces on a system in static equilibrium is zero for a set of infinitesimally small displacements.
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