20-letter words containing e, l, d
- jerez de la frontera — a town in SW Spain: famous for the making of sherry. Pop: 191 002 (2003 est)
- join-the-dots puzzle — a puzzle requiring you to connect a series of dots by drawing lines between them. If the dots are correctly connected, the result is a picture
- judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
- justifiable homicide — murder committed under extenuating circumstances
- juvenile delinquency — behavior of a child or youth that is so marked by violation of law, persistent mischievousness, antisocial behavior, disobedience, or intractability as to thwart correction by parents and to constitute a matter for action by the juvenile courts.
- kill the fatted calf — the young of the domestic cow or other bovine animal.
- kluver-bucy syndrome — a syndrome caused by bilateral injury to the temporal lobes and characterized by memory defect, hypersexuality, excessive oral behavior, and diminished fear reactions.
- knowledge management — data technology
- la canada-flintridge — a town in SW California.
- labour-saving device — a machine, gadget, etc, that reduces (human) effort, hard work or labour
- lafayette escadrille — a contingent of American aviators who in 1916 served as volunteers (Escadrille Américaine) in the French air force and in 1918 became the 103rd Pursuit Squadron of the U.S. Army.
- land-office business — a lively, booming, expanding, or very profitable business.
- language development — the development verbal communication skills in children
- languedoc-roussillon — a region of S France, on the Gulf of Lions: consists of the departments of Lozère, Gard, Hérault, Aude, and Pyrénées-Orientales; mainly mountainous with a coastal plain
- laugh one's head off — Phrases such as laugh your head off and scream your head off can be used to emphasize that someone is laughing or screaming a lot or very loudly.
- law-and-order issues — issues concerning law and social conventions
- lead someone a dance — to cause someone continued worry and exasperation; play up
- lead with one's chin — to act so imprudently as to invite disaster
- learned helplessness — the act of giving up trying as a result of consistent failure to be rewarded in life, thought to be a symptom of depression
- least-squares method — a method of estimating values from a set of observations by minimizing the sum of the squares of the differences between the observations and the values to be found.
- lieutenant commander — a commissioned officer ranking next below a commander and next above a lieutenant.
- light-emitting diode — LED.
- like a dose of salts — very quickly indeed
- like death warmed up — very ill
- linage advertisement — advertisements which are costed and paid for according to the number of lines in them
- linear address space — A memory addressing scheme used in processors where the whole memory can be accessed using a single address that fits in a single register or instruction. This contrasts with a segmented memory architecture, such as that used on the Intel 8086, where an address is given by an offset from a base address held in one of the "segment registers". Linear addressing greatly simplifies programming at the assembly language level but requires more instruction word bits to be allocated for an address.
- linearly ordered set — a set in which a relation, as “less than or equal to,” holds for all pairs of elements of the set.
- liquidity preference — (in Keynesian economics) the degree of individual preference for cash over less liquid assets.
- little pee dee river — a river in S North Carolina and N South Carolina, flowing S and SE to the Pee Dee River. 90 miles (145 km) long.
- little ringed plover — a small grey and brown coloured plover which breeds in Europe and Asia and migrates to Africa for winter
- live and breathe sth — be passionately interested in sth
- llywelyn ap gruffudd — died 1282, prince of Wales (1258–82): the only Welsh ruler to be recognized as such by the English
- long island iced tea — a potent cocktail consisting of equal parts of, typically, five different distilled alcoholic liquors, usually vodka, gin, rum, tequila, and triple sec, with a small amount of mixer, usually cola
- longitude by account — the longitude of the position of a vessel as estimated by dead reckoning.
- longitudinal section — the representation of an object as it would appear if cut by the vertical plane passing through the longest axis of the object.
- look homeward, angel — a novel (1929) by Thomas Wolfe.
- lord high chancellor — the highest judicial officer of the British crown: law adviser of the ministry, keeper of the great seal, presiding officer in the House of Lords, etc.
- lou gehrig's disease — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
- loyal order of moose — See under moose (def 2).
- macular degeneration — degeneration of the central portion of the retina, resulting in a loss of sharp vision.
- magnetic declination — variation (def 8).
- magneto-optical disk — (hardware, storage) (MO) A plastic or glass disk coated with a compound (often TbFeCo) with special optical, magnetic and thermal properties. The disk is read by bouncing a low-intensity laser off the disk. Originally the laser was infrared, but frequencies up to blue may be possible giving higher storage density. The polarisation of the reflected light depends on the polarity of the stored magnetic field. To write, a higher intensity laser heats the coating up to its Curie point, allowing its magnetisation to be altered in a way that is retained when it has cooled. Although optical, they appear as hard drives to the operating system and do not require a special filesystem (they can be formatted as FAT, HPFS, NTFS, etc.). The initial 5.25" MO drives, introduced at the end of the 1980s, were the size of a full-height 5.25" hard drive (like in IBM PC XT) and the disks looked like a CD-ROM enclosed in an old-style cartridge In 2006, a 3.5" drive has the size of 1.44 megabyte diskette drive with disks about the size of a regular 1.44MB floppy disc but twice the thickness.
- mail exchange record — (messaging) (MX Record) A DNS resource record type that says which SMTP server handles electronic mail for a particular domain. E.g. the MX record foo.co.uk. 1054 IN MX 10 mail.foo.co.uk. means that mail for an address like "[email protected]" should be sent to "mail.foo.co.uk". There can be several servers for a domain. The "10" is a priority - the server with the lowest number will be tried first.
- mail-order catalogue — a catalogue of goods you can buy from a particular company by mail order
- make head (n)or tail — If you say that you cannot make head nor tail of something or you cannot make head or tail of it, you are emphasizing that you cannot understand it at all.
- make head or tail of — to attempt to understand (a problem, etc)
- margaret of scotland — Saint. 1045–93, queen consort of Malcolm III of Scotland. Her piety and benefactions to the church led to her canonization (1250). Feast days: June 10, Nov 16
- marquis de lafayette — Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier [ma-ree zhaw-zef pawl eev rawk zheel-ber dy maw-tyey] /maˈri ʒɔˈzɛf pɔl iv rɔk ʒilˈbɛr dü mɔˈtyeɪ/ (Show IPA), Marquis de. Also, La Fayette. 1757–1834, French soldier, statesman, and liberal leader, who served in the American Revolutionary Army as aide-de-camp to General Washington, and took a leading part in the French revolutions of 1789 and 1830.
- maternal deprivation — the lack of a mother in a child's life, considered a cause of psychological problems later in life
- mechanical advantage — the ratio of output force to the input force applied to a mechanism.