17-letter words containing d, i, a, p
- incandescent lamp — a lamp that emits light due to the glowing of a heated material, especially the common device in which a tungsten filament enclosed within an evacuated glass bulb is rendered luminous by the passage of an electric current through it.
- incubation period — the period between infection and the appearance of signs of a disease.
- indecipherability — Quality of being indecipherable.
- independence hall — the building in Philadelphia where the Declaration of Independence was signed.
- independent audit — an audit of a company conducted by accountants from an outside accounting firm (distinguished from internal audit).
- independent axiom — in a set of axioms, one that cannot be proved by using the others in the set.
- indian paintbrush — any of several semiparasitic plants belonging to the genus Castilleja, of the figwort family, as C. linariaefolia, of the western U.S.: the state flower of Wyoming.
- indian rope-trick — the supposed Indian feat of climbing an unsupported rope
- indicator species — See at indicator (def 6).
- indispensableness — The characteristic of being indispensable; indispensability.
- integrated optics — an assembly of miniature optical elements of a size comparable to those used in electronic integrated circuits.
- interdepartmental — involving or existing between two or more departments: interdepartmental rivalry.
- interdisciplinary — combining or involving two or more academic disciplines or fields of study: The economics and history departments are offering an interdisciplinary seminar on Asia.
- interrupt handler — (software) A routine which is executed when an interrupt occurs. Interrupt handlers typically deal with low-level events in the hardware of a computer system such as a character arriving at a serial port or a tick of a real-time clock. Special care is required when writing an interrupt handler to ensure that either the interrupt which triggered the handler's execution is masked out (inhibitted) until the handler exits, or the handler is re-entrant so that multiple concurrent invocations will not interfere with each other. If interrupts are masked then the handler must execute as quickly as possible so that important events are not missed. This is often arranged by splitting the processing associated with the event into "upper" and "lower" halves. The lower part is the interrupt handler which masks out further interrupts as required, checks that the appropriate event has occurred (this may be necessary if several events share the same interrupt), services the interrupt, e.g. by reading a character from a UART and writing it to a queue, and re-enabling interrupts. The upper half executes as part of a user process. It waits until the interrupt handler has run. Normally the operating system is responsible for reactivating a process which is waiting for some low-level event. It detects this by a shared flag or by inspecting a shared queue or by some other synchronisation mechanism. It is important that the upper and lower halves do not interfere if an interrupt occurs during the execution of upper half code. This is usually ensured by disabling interrupts during critical sections of code such as removing a character from a queue.
- intradepartmental — Within a department.
- joined at the hip — friends: inseparable
- judgment of paris — the decision by Paris to award Aphrodite the golden apple of discord competed for by Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera.
- jurisprudentially — In terms of jurisprudence.
- kaleidoscopically — of, relating to, or created by a kaleidoscope.
- kidney transplant — surgery to replace a kidney
- lambda expression — (mathematics) A term in the lambda-calculus denoting an unnamed function (a "lambda abstraction"), a variable or a constant. The pure lambda-calculus has only functions and no constants.
- landscape painter — artist who depicts natural scenery
- least fixed point — (mathematics) A function f may have many fixed points (x such that f x = x). For example, any value is a fixed point of the identity function, (\ x . x). If f is recursive, we can represent it as f = fix F where F is some higher-order function and fix F = F (fix F). The standard denotational semantics of f is then given by the least fixed point of F. This is the least upper bound of the infinite sequence (the ascending Kleene chain) obtained by repeatedly applying F to the totally undefined value, bottom. I.e. fix F = LUB {bottom, F bottom, F (F bottom), ...}. The least fixed point is guaranteed to exist for a continuous function over a cpo.
- legal proceedings — court case
- linear dependence — (in linear algebra) the property of a set of elements in a vector space in which at least one of the vectors in the set can be written as a linear combination of the others.
- lipopolysaccaride — a molecule, consisting of lipid and polysaccharide components, that is the main constituent of the cell walls of Gram-negative bacteria
- liquid petrolatum — mineral oil.
- liquid propellant — a rocket propellant in liquid form.
- load displacement — the weight, in long tons, of a cargo vessel loaded so that the summer load line touches the surface of the water.
- lymphadenopathies — Plural form of lymphadenopathy.
- mean piston speed — The mean piston speed is the distance traveled by a piston in a specified amount of time.
- mean-spiritedness — the quality of being mean-spirited
- medical procedure — A medical procedure is a medical treatment or operation.
- mentally impaired — with reduced or weakened mental capacity
- metaperiodic acid — the crystalline compound HIO4, an oxyacid of iodine
- microencapsulated — Encapsulated using microencapsulation.
- middle-age spread — an increase in bulk, especially in the waist and buttocks, associated with the onset of middle age and the body's decreasing ability to metabolize calories efficiently.
- midmorning prayer — the third of the seven canonical hours; terce
- midsagittal plane — a plane passing through the nasion when the skull is oriented in the Frankfurt horizontal.
- mississippi delta — an area between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers in the northwest of the state of Mississippi; it is very flat and fertile
- moon and sixpence — a novel (1919) by W. Somerset Maugham.
- mounted policeman — policemen who patrol on horseback
- multidisciplinary — composed of or combining several usually separate branches of learning or fields of expertise: a multidisciplinary study of the 18th century.
- muscle dysmorphia — a mental disorder primarily affecting males, characterized by obsessions about a perceived lack of muscularity, leading to compulsive exercising, use of anabolic steroids, etc. Compare body dysmorphic disorder.
- new guinea pidgin — the variety of Neo-Melanesian spoken in Papua New Guinea and neighbouring islands
- occipital condyle — a protrusion on the occipital bone of the skull that forms a joint with the first cervical vertebra, enabling the head to move relative to the neck.
- old age pensioner — An old age pensioner is a person who is old enough to receive an pension from their employer or the government.
- old spanish trail — an overland route from Santa Fe, N. Mex., to Los Angeles, Calif., first marked out in 1776 by Spanish explorers and missionaries.
- one-time password — (security) (OTP) A security system that requires a new password every time a user authenticates themselves, thus protecting against an intruder replaying an intercepted password. OTP generates passwords using either the MD4 or MD5 hashing algorithms. The equivalent term "S/Key", developed by Bellcore, is a trademark of Telcordia Technologies, so the name OTP is used increasingly. See RFC 1760 - "The S/KEY One-Time Password System" and RFC 1938 - "A One-Time Password System".
- painted greenling — a greenling, Oxylebius pictus, inhabiting the Pacific coastal waters of North America, having a whitish body marked with black bands.