21-letter words containing d, i, m, e, n
- immediate constituent — one of the usually two largest constituents of a construction: The immediate constituents of He ate his dinner are he and ate his dinner; of ate his dinner are ate and his dinner; etc. Abbreviation: IC.
- in good circumstances — (of a person) in a good financial situation
- in someone's judgment — in someone's opinion
- in-complete dominance — the appearance in a heterozygote of a trait that is intermediate between either of the trait's homozygous phenotypes.
- induction loop system — a system enabling partially deaf people to hear dialogue and sound in theatres, cinemas, etc, consisting of a loop of wire placed round the perimeter of a designated area. This emits an electromagnetic signal which is picked up by a hearing aid
- kicking and screaming — If you say that someone is dragged kicking and screaming into a particular course of action, you are emphasizing that they are very unwilling to do what they are being made to do.
- kleine-levin syndrome — prolonged episodes of excessive sleepiness often accompanied by overeating, hallucinations, and electroencephalogram changes, usually beginning in adolescence.
- lady windermere's fan — a comedy (1892) by Oscar Wilde.
- law of thermodynamics — any of three principles variously stated in equivalent forms, being the principle that the change of energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the heat transferred minus the work done (first law of thermodynamics) the principle that no cyclic process is possible in which heat is absorbed from a reservoir at a single temperature and converted completely into mechanical work (second law of thermodynamics) and the principle that it is impossible to reduce the temperature of a system to absolute zero in a finite number of operations (third law of thermodynamics)
- lie at someone's door — a movable, usually solid, barrier for opening and closing an entranceway, cupboard, cabinet, or the like, commonly turning on hinges or sliding in grooves.
- luminous flux density — luminous flux per unit of cross-sectional area.
- madagascar aquamarine — a form of blue beryl from Madagascar, used as a gemstone
- madagascar periwinkle — a plant, Catharanthus roseus (or Vinca rosea), cultivated for its glossy foliage and pink or white flowers.
- magnetic flux density — Also called magnetic flux density. a vector quantity used as a measure of a magnetic field. Symbol: B.
- magneto-optical drive — magneto-optical disk
- magnetofluid dynamics — magnetohydrodynamics.
- magnetoplasmadynamics — magnetohydrodynamics.
- magnificent riflebird — a bird of paradise, Craspedophora magnifica
- maidenhair spleenwort — an evergreen fern, Asplenium trichomanes, abundant in woody areas of the North Temperate Zone, having thickly clustered fronds.
- majority shareholding — a holding of more than half a company's shares
- make one's blood boil — the fluid that circulates in the principal vascular system of human beings and other vertebrates, in humans consisting of plasma in which the red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets are suspended.
- maple-leaved viburnum — dockmackie.
- mariage de convenance — marriage entered into for a personal or family advantage, as for social, political, or economic reasons, usually without love and sometimes without the expectation of sexual relations.
- marine superintendent — a person who is responsible for the maintenance of the vessels of a shipping line, for their docking and the handling of cargo, and for the hiring of personnel for deck departments.
- mean square deviation — variance (def 3).
- mechanical solidarity — social cohesiveness that is based on shared activities, beliefs, and experiences and is characteristic of simple traditional societies.
- medical jurisprudence — forensic medicine.
- mediterranean climate — a climate characterized by warm, dry summers and rainy winters
- medium access control — Media Access Control
- medium dry white wine — Medium dry white wine is white wine that is not very sweet.
- member of the wedding — a novel (1946) and play (1950) by Carson McCullers.
- meter-kilogram-second — of or relating to the system of units in which the meter, kilogram, and second are the principal units of length, mass, and time. Abbreviation: mks, MKS.
- metopon hydrochloride — a narcotic drug, C18H21O3N·HCl, derived from morphine, but slightly more potent: used in medicine to relieve pain
- metropolitan district — any of the districts making up the metropolitan counties of England: since 1986 they have functioned as unitary authorities, forming the sole principal tier of local government. Each metropolitan district has an elected council responsible for education, social services, etc
- model-view-controller — (programming) (MVC) A way of partitioning the design of interactive software; a software architecture pattern. The "model" is the internal workings of the program (the data objects and algorithms), the "view" is how the user sees the state of the model and the "controller" is how the user changes the state or provides input. MVC was the original kind of what is now sometimes called an MV* pattern. Trygve Reenskaug introduced it into Smalltalk-76 while visiting Xerox PARC in the 1970s.
- modern apprenticeship — an arrangement that allows a school leaver to gain vocational qualifications while being trained in a job
- monochloroacetic acid — chloroacetic acid.
- motherwell and wishaw — a burgh in the Motherwell district, in S Scotland.
- motor neurone disease — Motor neurone disease is a disease which destroys the part of a person's nervous system that controls movement.
- multi-ringed compound — A multi-ringed compound is a compound which has 70 or more carbon atoms, often a residual compound.
- muon-catalysed fusion — an experimental form of nuclear fusion in which hydrogen and deuterium muonic atoms are formed. Because the mass of the muon is much larger than that of the electron, the atoms are smaller, and the nuclei are close enough for fusion to occur
- network administrator — (job) A person who manages a communications network within an organisation. Responsibilities include network security, installing new applications, distributing software upgrades, monitoring daily activity, enforcing licensing agreements, developing a storage management program and providing for routine backups.
- nine-banded armadillo — an armadillo, Dasypus novemcinctus, of the southern U.S. to Argentina, having nine hinged bands of bony plates, the female of which usually gives birth to quadruplets that are always of the same sex.
- nominative of address — a noun naming the person to whom one is speaking.
- non-maintainer upload — (operating system) (NMU) A release of a Debian package by someone other than its usual maintainer. E.g. "The bug was fixed in a recent NMU."
- non-repeating decimal — a decimal representation of any irrational number, having the property that no sequence of digits is repeated ad infinitum.
- northumberland strait — the part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence that separates Prince Edward Island from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in SE Canada. About 200 miles (320 km) long; 9–30 miles (15–48 km) wide.
- of time and the river — a novel (1935) by Thomas Wolfe.
- one-dimensional array — (types) An array with only one dimension; the simplest kind of array, consisting of a sequence of items ("elements"), all of the same type. An element is selected by an integer index that normally starts at zero for the first element and increases by one. The index of the last element is thus the length of the array minus one. A one-dimensional array is also known as a vector. It should not be confused with a list. In some languages, e.g. Perl, all arrays are one-dimensional and higher dimensions are represented as arrays of pointers to arrays (which can have different sizes and can themselves contain pointers to arrays and so on). A one-dimensional array maps simply to memory: the address of an element with index i is A(i) = A0 + i * s where A0 is the base address of the array and s is the size of storage used for each element, the "stride". Elements may be padded to certain address boundaries, e.g. machine words, to increase access speed, in which case the stride will be larger than the amount of data in an element.
- pacific standard time — See under standard time.