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18-letter words containing c, a, o

  • lambeth conference — a convention of the bishops of the Anglican communion, held about every 10 years at Lambeth Palace to confer but not to define doctrine or to legislate on ecclesiastical matters.
  • land grant college — a state university established with a grant of public land
  • land-grant college — a U.S. college or university (land-grant university) entitled to support from the federal government under the provisions of the Morrill Acts.
  • last chance saloon — a place frequented by unsavoury or contemptible people
  • laugh out of court — to express mirth, pleasure, derision, or nervousness with an audible, vocal expulsion of air from the lungs that can range from a loud burst of sound to a series of quiet chuckles and is usually accompanied by characteristic facial and bodily movements.
  • launching ceremony — a ceremony that celebrates the launch of a ship for the first time into the water
  • law of mass action — the statement that the rate of a chemical reaction is proportional to the concentrations of the reacting substances.
  • lawrence of arabia — D(avid) H(erbert) 1885–1930, English novelist.
  • lenticular process — a method for producing images with a three-dimensional effect by photographing on lenticulated film.
  • lieutenant colonel — a commissioned officer ranking next below a colonel and next above a major.
  • lincoln's birthday — February 12, a legal holiday in some states of the U.S., in honor of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.
  • linear accelerator — an accelerator in which particles are propelled in straight paths by the use of alternating electric voltages that are timed in such a way that the particles receive increasing increments of energy.
  • linear combination — a sum of products of each quantity times a constant: The expression aX + bY + cZ is a linear combination of X, Y, and Z, where a, b, and c are constants.
  • lipopolysaccharide — any of a class of polysaccharides to which lipids are attached.
  • liqueur chocolates — chocolates containing liqueur
  • lithostratigraphic — Of or pertaining to lithostratigraphy.
  • little spotted cat — a small New World tiger cat, Felis tigrinus, ranging from Costa Rica to northern Argentina.
  • local area network — a system for linking private telecommunications equipment, as in a building or cluster of buildings.
  • local examinations — (in the UK) any of various examinations, such as the GCE, set by university boards and conducted in local centres, schools, etc
  • 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.
  • logarithmic spiral — log r = aθ
  • logical complement — (logic)   In Boolean algebra, the logical complement or negation of a Boolean value is the opposite value, given by the following truth table: A | -A --+--- T | F F | T -A is also written as A with a bar over it or with a small vertical line hanging from the right-hand end of the "-" (LaTeX \neg) or as A'. In the C programming language, it is !A and in digital circuit design, /A.
  • logical positivism — a philosophical movement that stresses the function of philosophy as a method of criticizing and analyzing science and that rejects all transcendental metaphysics, statements of fact being held to be meaningful only if they have verifiable consequences in experience and in statements of logic, mathematics, or philosophy itself, and with such statements of fact deriving their validity from the rules of language.
  • logical positivist — an exponent or follower of logical positivism
  • logical shift left — logical shift
  • logically possible — capable of being described without self-contradiction
  • lonely hearts club — a club for people who are trying to find a lover or a friend
  • long-distance call — phone call: not local area
  • long-stay car park — a car park (eg at an airport) where cars can be left for a long time
  • louisiana purchase — a treaty signed with France in 1803 by which the U.S. purchased for $15,000,000 the land extending from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
  • lower palaeolithic — the earliest of the three sections of the Palaeolithic, beginning about 3 million years ago and ending about 70 000 bc with the emergence of Neanderthal man
  • luminous emittance — luminous flux emitted per unit area.
  • macro preprocessor — preprocessor
  • macroinvertebrates — Plural form of macroinvertebrate.
  • 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".
  • magistrate's court — a court having limited jurisdiction over minor civil and criminal matters, as matters of contract not exceeding a particular amount of money.
  • magistrates' court — law: handles minor crimes
  • magnetic induction — Also called magnetic flux density. a vector quantity used as a measure of a magnetic field. Symbol: B.
  • magnetic potential — a scalar quantity, analogous to the electric potential, defined at each point in a given magnetic field to be equal to the work done in bringing a unit north pole from infinity to the point.
  • magnetic recording — the process of recording sound or other data on magnetic tape, wire, etc.
  • magnetic resonance — the response by atoms, molecules, or nuclei subjected to a magnetic field to radio waves or other forms of energy: used in medicine for scanning
  • magnetic variation — variation (def 8).
  • magnetocrystalline — (physics) Describing the interaction between the magnetization and the crystal structure of a material.
  • magnetoelectricity — electricity developed by the action of magnets.
  • magnetogasdynamics — magnetohydrodynamics.
  • magnetorheological — (physics) describing a substance whose rheological properties are modified by a magnetic field.
  • make (one's) peace — If you make peace with someone or make your peace with them, you put an end to your quarrel with them, often by apologizing.
  • make a practice of — be in the habit of
  • make allowance for — the act of allowing.
  • make no difference — to have no effect; not matter
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