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12-letter words containing e, k, m

  • keeping room — hall (def 11).
  • ken thompson — (person)   The principal inventor of the Unix operating system and author of the B language, the predecessor of C. In the early days Ken used to hand-cut Unix distribution tapes, often with a note that read "Love, ken". Old-timers still use his first name (sometimes uncapitalised, because it's a login name and mail address) in third-person reference; it is widely understood (on Usenet in particular) that without a last name "Ken" refers only to Ken Thompson. Similarly, Dennis without last name means Dennis Ritchie (and he is often known as dmr). Ken was first hired to work on the Multics project, which was a huge production with many people working on it. Multics was supposed to support hundreds of on-line logins but could barely handle three. In 1969, when Bell Labs withdrew from the project, Ken got fed up with Multics and went off to write his own operating system. People said "well, if zillions of people wrote Multics, then an OS written by one guy must be Unix!". There was some joking about eunichs as well. Ken's wife Bonnie and son Corey (then 18 months old) went to visit family in San Diego. Ken spent one week each on the kernel, file system, etc., and finished UNIX in one month along with developing SPACEWAR (or was it "Space Travel"?). See also back door, brute force, demigod, wumpus.
  • kenny method — a method of treating poliomyelitis, in which hot, moist packs are applied to affected muscles to relieve spasms and pain, and a regimen of exercises is prescribed to prevent deformities and to strengthen the muscles.
  • keratotomies — Plural form of keratotomy.
  • key lime pie — a custardlike pie made with lime juice, condensed milk, eggs, and flavorings and served in a pastry shell.
  • killer micro — [Popularised by Eugene Brooks] A microprocessor-based machine that infringes on mini, mainframe, or supercomputer performance turf. Often heard in "No one will survive the attack of the killer micros!", the battle cry of the downsizers. Used especially of RISC architectures. The popularity of the phrase "attack of the killer micros" is doubtless reinforced by the movie title "Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes" (one of the canonical examples of so-bad-it's-wonderful among hackers). This has even more flavour now that killer micros have gone on the offensive not just individually (in workstations) but in hordes (within massively parallel computers).
  • kim dae jung — 1925–2009, president of South Korea 1998–2003.
  • kingdom come — the next world; the hereafter; heaven.
  • klamath weed — the St.-John's-wort, Hypericum perforatum.
  • kleptomaniac — a person who has kleptomania.
  • know by name — to have heard of without having met
  • kolyma range — a mountain range in NE Russia, in NE Siberia, extending about 1100 km (700 miles) between the Kolyma River and the Sea of Okhotsk. Highest peak: 1862 m (6109 ft)
  • kremlinology — the study of the government of the former Soviet Union, especially the study of those factors governing its foreign affairs.
  • labor market — the available supply of labor considered with reference to the demand for it.
  • lake mälaren — a lake in S Sweden, extending 121 km (75 miles) west from Stockholm, where it joins with an inlet of the Baltic Sea (the Saltsjön). Area: 1140 sq km (440 sq miles)
  • lake managua — a lake in W Nicaragua: drains into Lake Nicaragua by the Tipitapa River. Length: 61 km (38 miles). Width: about 26 km (16 miles)
  • lambeth walk — a spirited ballroom dance popular, especially in England, in the late 1930s.
  • lamp bracket — a bracket for holding a lamp
  • leading mark — either of two conspicuous objects regarded as points on a line (leading line) upon which a vessel can sail a safe course.
  • lemminkainen — (in the Kalevala) a young, jovial hero who has many adventures in which he is sometimes helped by his mother.
  • like a charm — perfectly; successfully
  • like a dream — If you say that someone does something like a dream, you think that they do it very well. If you say that something happens like a dream, you mean that it happens successfully without any problems.
  • linked rhyme — a rhyme in which the end of one line together with the first sound of the next line forms a rhyme with the end of another line.
  • lukewarmness — The property of being lukewarm; ambivalence, weakness.
  • lumberjacket — a short, straight, wool plaid jacket or coat, for informal wear, usually belted and having patch pockets.
  • mackerel sky — an extensive group of cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds, especially when well-marked in their arrangement: so called because of a resemblance to the scales on a mackerel.
  • mackintoshes — Plural form of mackintosh.
  • madeira cake — a kind of rich sponge cake
  • magic cookie — 1. Something passed between routines or programs that enables the receiver to perform some operation; a capability ticket or opaque identifier. Especially used of small data objects that contain data encoded in a strange or intrinsically machine-dependent way. E.g. on non-Unix operating systems with a non-byte-stream model of files, the result of "ftell" may be a magic cookie rather than a byte offset; it can be passed to "fseek", but not operated on in any meaningful way. The phrase "it hands you a magic cookie" means it returns a result whose contents are not defined but which can be passed back to the same or some other program later. 2. An in-band code for changing graphic rendition (e.g. inverse video or underlining) or performing other control functions. Some older terminals would leave a blank on the screen corresponding to mode-change magic cookies; this was also called a glitch (or occasionally a "turd"; compare mouse droppings). See also cookie.
  • magic marker — felt-tip pen
  • magnetic ink — ink containing particles of a magnetic material used for printing characters for magnetic character recognition
  • mail-cheeked — (of certain fishes) having the cheeks crossed with a bony plate.
  • make a noise — to talk a great deal or complain
  • make a stand — to take a position for defense or opposition
  • make believe — the style or manner in which something is made; form; build.
  • make certain — ensure
  • make demands — If someone or something makes demands on you, they require you to do things which need a lot of time, energy, or money.
  • make eyes at — the organ of sight, in vertebrates typically one of a pair of spherical bodies contained in an orbit of the skull and in humans appearing externally as a dense, white, curved membrane, or sclera, surrounding a circular, colored portion, or iris, that is covered by a clear, curved membrane, or cornea, and in the center of which is an opening, or pupil, through which light passes to the retina.
  • make friends — get to know people
  • make game of — to make fun of; ridicule; mock
  • make headway — forward movement; progress in a forward direction: The ship's headway was slowed by the storm.
  • make history — do sth of great significance
  • make inroads — If one thing makes inroads into another, the first thing starts affecting or destroying the second.
  • make much of — great in quantity, measure, or degree: too much cake.
  • make poo poo — excrement; feces.
  • make sb sick — disgust sb morally
  • make the bed — rearrange the bedsheets
  • make the cut — to better or equal the required score after two rounds in a strokeplay tournament, thus avoiding elimination from the final two rounds
  • make whoopee — make whoopee, to engage in uproarious merrymaking.
  • make-believe — pretense, especially of an innocent or playful kind; feigning; sham: the make-believe of children playing.
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