0%

18-letter words containing a, t, y, c

  • ethnopsychological — Relating to ethnopsychology.
  • european community — an economic and political association of European States that came into being in 1967, when the legislative and executive bodies of the European Economic Community merged with those of the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Atomic Energy Community: subsumed into the European Union in 1993
  • eyewitness account — a description given by someone who was present at an event
  • family-size packet — a packet large enough to be suitable for a family
  • fifth monarchy men — (during the Commonwealth in the 17th century) a militant sect of Puritans who identified the fifth monarchy with the millennial reign of Christ and who believed they should help to inaugurate that reign by force.
  • fixed-term tenancy — a tenancy arrangement for a particular and fixed period
  • fly in the face of — to move through the air using wings.
  • gas chromatography — a chromatograph used for the separation of volatile substances.
  • gensym corporation — (company)   A company that supplies software and services for intelligent operations management. Common applications include quality management, process optimisation, dynamic scheduling, network management, energy and environmental management, and process modelling and simulation. Their products include G2.
  • gestalt psychology — (sometimes lowercase) the theory or doctrine that physiological or psychological phenomena do not occur through the summation of individual elements, as reflexes or sensations, but through gestalts functioning separately or interrelatedly.
  • glyceryl trioleate — olein.
  • goya (y lucientes) — Fran‧ˈcis‧co Jo‧ˈsé‧ de (fʀɑnˈθiskɔhɔˈsɛ ðɛ) ; fränt hēsˈk^ōh^ōseˈ the) 1746-1828; Sp. painter
  • graduated cylinder — a narrow, cylindrical container marked with horizontal lines to represent units of measurement and used to precisely measure the volume of liquids.
  • grand canyon state — Arizona (used as a nickname).
  • gravity escapement — an escapement, used especially in large outdoor clocks, in which the impulse is given to the pendulum by means of a weight falling through a certain distance.
  • gyromagnetic ratio — the ratio of the magnetic moment of a rotating charged particle to its angular momentum.
  • heteroscedasticity — (statistics) The property of a series of random variables of 'not' every variable having the same finite variance.
  • heteroskedasticity — Alternative spelling of heteroscedasticity.
  • hidalgo y costilla — Miguel [mee-gel] /miˈgɛl/ (Show IPA), 1753–1811, Mexican priest, patriot, and revolutionist.
  • histocompatibility — the condition of having antigenic similarities such that cells or tissues transplanted from one (the donor) to another (the recipient) are not rejected.
  • historical geology — the branch of geology dealing with the history of the earth.
  • honorary secretary — a unpaid person who is one of the managers of an organization
  • hot-water cylinder — a vertical cylindrical tank for storing hot water, esp an insulated one made of copper used in a domestic hot-water system
  • hydroxyacetic acid — glycolic acid.
  • hyper-intellectual — appealing to or engaging the intellect: intellectual pursuits.
  • hyper-metaphorical — a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, as in “A mighty fortress is our God.”. Compare mixed metaphor, simile (def 1).
  • hypercholesteremia — Alternative spelling of hypercholesteraemia.
  • hyperconcentration — the act of concentrating; the state of being concentrated.
  • hypernationalistic — a person devoted to nationalism.
  • hypogastric artery — iliac artery (def 3).
  • hysterical reasons — (Or "hysterical raisins") A variant on the stock phrase "for historical reasons", indicating specifically that something must be done in some stupid way for backward compatibility, and moreover that the feature it must be compatible with was the result of a bad design in the first place. "All IBM PC video adaptors have to support MDA text mode for hysterical reasons." Compare bug-for-bug compatible.
  • in company with sb — If you feel, believe, or know something in company with someone else, you both feel, believe, or know it.
  • incapacity benefit — (in Britain) a regular government payment made to people who are unable to work for an extended period through disability
  • incommensurability — not commensurable; having no common basis, measure, or standard of comparison.
  • inconsequentiality — of little or no importance; insignificant; trivial.
  • indiscriminatingly — In an indiscriminating manner.
  • indolebutyric acid — a white or yellowish, crystalline, water-insoluble powder, C 12 H 13 O 2 N, a plant hormone similar to indoleacetic acid and used for the same purposes.
  • interchangeability — (of two things) capable of being put or used in the place of each other: interchangeable symbols.
  • interface analysis — (testing)   A software test which checks the interfaces between program elements for consistency and adherence to predefined rules or axioms.
  • 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.
  • johnny-come-lately — a late arrival or participant; newcomer: the Johnny-come-latelies producing space-war films after the trend had ended.
  • kentucky bluegrass — a grass, Poa pratensis, of the Mississippi valley, used for pasturage and lawns.
  • lincoln's birthday — February 12, a legal holiday in some states of the U.S., in honor of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.
  • literary criticism — study and review of literature
  • locally finite set — a collection of sets in a topological space in which each point of the space has a neighborhood that intersects a finite number of sets of the collection.
  • lonely hearts club — a club for people who are trying to find a lover or a friend
  • long-stay car park — a car park (eg at an airport) where cars can be left for a long time
  • 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".
Was this page helpful?
Yes No
Thank you for your feedback! Tell your friends about this page
Tell us why?