18-letter words containing c, o, h, s
- histocompatibility — the condition of having antigenic similarities such that cells or tissues transplanted from one (the donor) to another (the recipient) are not rejected.
- histomorphological — histology.
- historical fiction — the genre of literature, film, etc., comprising narratives that take place in the past and are characterized chiefly by an imaginative reconstruction of historical events and personages.
- historical geology — the branch of geology dealing with the history of the earth.
- historical present — the present tense used in narrating a past event as if happening at the time of narration.
- homeowner's policy — a form of home insurance that provides compensation for damage, loss, or injury of property, personal belongings, or persons due to fire, theft, accidents, etc.
- 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.
- honorary secretary — a unpaid person who is one of the managers of an organization
- horseless carriage — an automobile: The horse and buggy were eventually replaced by the horseless carriage.
- horses for courses — a policy, course of action, etc modified slightly to take account of specific circumstances without departing in essentials from the original
- hotel receptionist — a person who looks after guests when they first arrive at a hotel, checking them in, giving them their keys, etc
- housing conditions — the physical state of houses or dwellings
- hydrofluorocarbons — Plural form of hydrofluorocarbon.
- hypercholesteremia — Alternative spelling of hypercholesteraemia.
- hypermodern school — a style of chess characterized by control of the centre from the flanks
- hypernationalistic — a person devoted to nationalism.
- hypodermic syringe — a small glass piston or barrel syringe having a detachable, hollow needle for use in injecting solutions subcutaneously.
- hypogastric artery — iliac artery (def 3).
- hypophysis cerebri — the master endocrine gland, attached by a stalk to the base of the brain.
- hyposulfurous acid — an acid, H 2 S 2 O 4 , next in a series below sulfurous acid, known only in solution or in the form of its salts.
- 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.
- immunohistological — the microscopic study of tissues with the aid of antibodies that bind to tissue components and reveal their presence.
- in company with sb — If you feel, believe, or know something in company with someone else, you both feel, believe, or know it.
- in comparison with — when compared to
- in the face of sth — If you take a particular action or attitude in the face of a problem or difficulty, you respond to that problem or difficulty in that way.
- independent school — (in Britain) a school that is neither financed nor controlled by the government or local authorities
- irreproachableness — The quality or state of being irreproachable; integrity; innocence.
- isothermal process — a process that takes place without change in temperature.
- isthmus of corinth — a narrow strip of land between the Gulf of Corinth and the Saronic Gulf: crossed by the Corinth Canal making navigation possible between the gulfs
- jacksonville beach — a city in NE Florida.
- japanese artichoke — Chinese artichoke.
- john birch society — an ultraconservative organization, founded in December 1958 by Robert Welch, Jr., chiefly to combat alleged Communist activities in the U.S.
- josephson junction — a high-speed switch, used in experimental computers, that operates on the basis of a radiative phenomenon (Jo·sephson effect) exhibited by a pair of superconductors separated by a thin insulator.
- junior high school — a school attended after elementary school and usually consisting of grades seven through nine.
- keep one's chin up — the lower extremity of the face, below the mouth.
- king of the castle — most powerful figure
- last chance saloon — a place frequented by unsavoury or contemptible people
- lincoln's birthday — February 12, a legal holiday in some states of the U.S., in honor of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.
- lipopolysaccharide — any of a class of polysaccharides to which lipids are attached.
- liqueur chocolates — chocolates containing liqueur
- list comprehension — (functional programming) An expression in a functional language denoting the results of some operation on (selected) elements of one or more lists. An example in Haskell: This returns all pairs of numbers (x,y) where x and y are elements of the list 1, 2, ..., 10, y <= x and their sum is less than 10. A list comprehension is simply "syntactic sugar" for a combination of applications of the functions, concat, map and filter. For instance the above example could be written: The term "list comprehension" appears in the references below. The earliest reference to the notation is in Rod Burstall and John Darlington's description of their language, NPL. David Turner subsequently adopted this notation in his languages SASL, KRC and Miranda, where he has called them "ZF expressions", set abstractions and list abstractions (in his 1985 FPCA paper [Miranda: A Non-Strict Functional Language with Polymorphic Types]).
- lithostratigraphic — Of or pertaining to lithostratigraphy.
- logarithmic spiral — log r = aθ
- logical shift left — logical shift
- lonely hearts club — a club for people who are trying to find a lover or a friend
- long-hours culture — The long-hours culture is the way in which some workers feel that they are expected to work much longer hours than they are paid to do.
- lord chief justice — the presiding judge of Britain's High Court of Justice, the superior court of record for both criminal and civil cases.
- loschmidt's number — the number of molecules in one cubic centimeter of an ideal gas at standard temperature and pressure, equal to 2.687 × 10 19.
- 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.
- 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".