22-letter words containing d, i, s, t, a
- hoof-and-mouth disease — foot-and-mouth disease.
- horn-rimmed spectacles — spectacles with rims made of material resembling horn
- hospital administrator — a person who works in the management team of a hospital
- in one's birthday suit — naked; nude
- in sackcloth and ashes — in a state of great mourning or penitence
- in the lap of the gods — If you say that a situation is in the lap of the gods, you mean that its success or failure depends entirely on luck or on things that are outside your control.
- in your wildest dreams — If you say that you could not imagine a particular thing in your wildest dreams, you are emphasizing that you think it is extremely strange or unlikely.
- independent assortment — law of independent assortment.
- indeterminate sentence — a penalty, imposed by a court, that has relatively wide limits or no limits, as one of imprisonment for one to ten years.
- industrial archaeology — the study of past industrial machines, works, etc
- industrial engineering — engineering applied to the planning, design, and control of industrial operations.
- industrialized country — a country characterized by industry on an extensive scale
- international standard — (standard) The series of standards from ISO and its subcommitees.
- interoperable database — A database front-end which communicates with multiple heterogenous databases and makes them appear as a single homogenous entity with semantic calls. See ODBC.
- investigative new drug — a regulatory classification assigned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to an unproven drug, allowing its use in approved studies with human patients. Abbreviation: IND.
- islamic fundamentalism — the belief or advocating of a conservative adherence to literal or traditional interpretations of the Qu'ran and the Sunnah
- islands of the blessed — lands where the souls of heroes and good men were taken after death
- it's london to a brick — it is certain
- kensington and chelsea — a borough of Greater London, England.
- lady's not for burning — a verse play (1948) by Christopher Fry.
- land of the rising sun — Japan.
- landscape architecture — the art of arranging or modifying the features of a landscape, an urban area, etc., for aesthetic or practical reasons.
- let sth drop/fall/slip — If you let drop, let fall, or let slip information, you reveal it casually or by accident, during a conversation about something else.
- limited access highway — expressway
- liquid crystal display — (hardware) (LCD) An electro-optical device used to display digits, characters or images, commonly used in digital watches, calculators, and portable computers. The heart of the liquid crystal display is a piece of liquid crystal material placed between a pair of transparent electrodes. The liquid crystal changes the phase of the light passing through it and this phase change can be controlled by the voltage applied between the electrodes. If such a unit is placed between a pair of plane polariser plates then light can pass through it only if the correct voltage is applied. Liquid crystal displays are formed by integrating a number of such cells, or more usually, by using a single liquid crystal plate and a pattern of electrodes. The simplest kind of liquid crystal displays, those used in digital watches and calculators, contain a common electrode plane covering one side and a pattern of electrodes on the other. These electrodes can be individually controlled to produce the appropriate display. Computer displays, however, require far too many pixels (typically between 50,000 and several millions) to make this scheme, in particular its wiring, feasible. The electrodes are therefore replaced by a number of row electrodes on one side and column electrodes on the other. By applying voltage to one row and several columns the pixels at the intersections are set. The pixels being set one row after the other, in passive matrix displays the number of rows is limited by the ratio of the setting and fading times. In the setup described above (known as "twisted nematic") the number of rows is limited to about 20. Using an alternative "supertwisted nematic" setup VGA quality displays (480 rows) can be easily built. As of 1995 most notebook computers used this technique. Fading can be slowed by putting an active element, such as a transistor, on the top of each pixel. This "remembers" the setting of that pixel. These active matrix displays are of much better quality (as good as CRTs) but are much more expensive than the passive matrix displays. LCDs are slimmer, lighter and consume less power than the previous dominant display type, the cathode ray tube, hence their importance for portable computers.
- little st bernard pass — a pass over the Savoy Alps, between Bourg-Saint-Maurice, France, and La Thuile, Italy: 11th-century hospice. Height: 2187 m (7177 ft)
- lord justice of appeal — an ordinary judge of the Court of Appeal
- manufacturing industry — the industry of manufacturing goods from raw materials
- middle atlantic states — the states of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey
- middle-distance runner — someone who runs races of a length between the sprints and the distance events, esp the 800 metres and the 1500 metres
- molecular distillation — a vacuum distillation in which the molecules of the distillate reach the condenser before colliding with one another.
- most significant digit — the digit farthest to the left in a number. Abbreviation: MSD.
- mountain standard time — one of the standard times used in North America, seven hours behind Greenwich Mean Time
- national semiconductor — (company) A semiconductor manufacturer, responsible for the SC/MP, National Semiconductor 16000 and National Semiconductor 32000 series of microprocessors.
- netherlands new guinea — a former name of Irian Jaya.
- nodal switching system — (NSS) Main routing nodes in the NSFnet backbone.
- nominal semidestructor — (abuse) Slang for "National Semiconductor", found among other places in the 4.3BSD networking sources. During the late 1970s to mid-1980s this company marketed a series of microprocessors including the National Semiconductor 16000 and National Semiconductor 32000. At one point early in the great microprocessor race, the specs on these chips made them look like serious competition for the rising Intel 80x86 and Motorola 680x0 series. Unfortunately, the actual parts were notoriously flaky and never implemented the full instruction set promised in their literature, apparently because the company couldn't get any of the mask steppings to work as designed. They eventually sank without trace, joining the Zilog Z8000 and a few even more obscure also-rans in the graveyard of forgotten microprocessors.
- object-oriented pascal — Object Pascal
- of the first magnitude — of the greatest importance
- on a shoestring budget — with very little money to spend
- operation desert storm — the codename for the US-led UN operation to liberate Kuwait from Iraq (1991)
- operational data store — (database) (ODS) A group of integrated databases designed to support the monitoring of operations. Unlike function oriented databases, an ODS contains subject-oriented, dynamic, current enterprise-wide information that is continually updated to show the current state of operations.
- outside awareness port — (humour) (OAP) A humorous IBM term for a window (the glass kind) rather than the GUI kind.
- over-industrialization — the large-scale introduction of manufacturing, advanced technical enterprises, and other productive economic activity into an area, society, country, etc.
- parker morris standard — (in Britain) a set of minimum criteria for good housing construction, design, and facilities, recommended by the 1961 report of the Central Housing Advisory Committee chaired by Sir Parker Morris. Subsequent governments have urged private and local authority house-builders to achieve these standards
- paroxysmal tachycardia — tachycardia that begins and subsides suddenly.
- passive matrix display — (hardware) A type of liquid crystal display which relies on persistence to maintain the state of each display element (pixel) between refresh scans. The resolution of such displays is limited by the ratio between the time to set a pixel and the time it takes to fade. Contrast active matrix display.
- peanut-butter sandwich — a sandwich with a filling of peanut-butter
- personal rapid transit — a short system of small, self-propelled, automated, rubber-tired vehicles that usually run on elevated concrete tracks and allow a passenger a limited selection of routes, as in an amusement park or at an airport. Abbreviation: PRT.
- planck's radiation law — the law that energy associated with electromagnetic radiation, as light, is composed of discrete quanta of energy, each quantum equal to Planck's constant times the corresponding frequency of the radiation: the fundamental law of quantum mechanics.