20-letter words containing g, o, n, s
- john o'groat's house — the northern tip of Scotland, near Duncansby Head, NE Caithness, traditionally thought of as the northernmost point of Britain: from Land's End to John o'Groat's House.
- judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
- king's-pawn openings — a class of chess openings in which the pawn in front of the king is advanced two squares on the first move.
- kingston upon thames — a borough of Greater London, England.
- knights hospitallers — a military religious order founded about the time of the first crusade (1096–99) among European crusaders. It took its name from a hospital and hostel in Jerusalem
- laboratory diagnosis — scientific analysis of a disease
- labour-saving device — a machine, gadget, etc, that reduces (human) effort, hard work or labour
- 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 of large numbers — the theorem in probability theory that the number of successes increases as the number of experiments increases and approximates the probability times the number of experiments for a large number of experiments.
- leg-of-mutton sleeve — a sleeve on a woman's garment that is loose on the arm but tight at the wrist
- legal representation — representation by a lawyer
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- logical construction — anything referred to by an incomplete symbol capable of contextual definition.
- 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
- long topgallant mast — a single spar fitted above a topmast to carry topgallants, a royal, and all sails above.
- 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.
- lymphogranulomatosis — widespread infectious granuloma of the lymphatic system.
- macias nguema biyogo — a former name of Bioko.
- 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.
- magnetohydrodynamics — the branch of physics that deals with the motion of electrically conductive fluids, especially plasmas, in magnetic fields. Abbreviation: MHD.
- mail transport agent — Message Transfer Agent
- malpighian corpuscle — Also called kidney corpuscle, Malpighian body. the structure at the beginning of a vertebrate nephron, consisting of a glomerulus and its surrounding Bowman's capsule.
- 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
- mass-energy equation — the equation, E=mc2, formulated by Albert Einstein, expressing the equivalence between mass and energy, where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the velocity of light.
- mean something to sb — If a name, word, or phrase means something to you, you have heard it before and you know what it refers to.
- measure one's length — to fall, lie, or be thrown down at full length
- megabytes per second — (unit) (MBps, MB/s) Millions of bytes per second. A unit of data rate. 1 MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes per second (not 1,048,576).
- microsoft networking — (networking) Microsoft's name for the networking subsystems of Windows 95 and later. Not to be confused with The Microsoft Network. Microsoft networking uses the SMB file sharing protocol. It is implemented as file system drivers i.e. "installable file systems" (IFS). The network redirector "Client for Microsoft Networks", is implemented in the VREDIR.VXD virtual device driver. Peer resource sharing is provided by "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks" (VSERVER.VXD). Windows 95's support for Netware (NCP) networks is provided in a similar way via NWREDIR.VXD and NWSERVER.VXD.
- molecular gastronomy — an approach to cooking in which a chef’s knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology allows him or her to experiment with unusual flavour combinations and cooking techniques
- molecular geneticist — a specialist in the study of the molecular constitution of genes and chromosomes
- monosodium glutamate — a white, crystalline, water-soluble powder, C 5 H 8 NNaO 4 ⋅H 2 O, used to intensify the flavor of foods.
- most general unifier — (logic) If U is the most general unifier of a set of expressions then any other unifier, V, can be expressed as V = UW, where W is another substitution. See also unification.
- most significant bit — (MSB) Bit n-1 in an n bit binary number, the bit with the greatest weight (2^(n-1)). The first or leftmost bit when the number is written in the usual way.
- nephroangiosclerosis — (pathology) sclerosis of the renal arterioles.
- net register tonnage — the taxable gross tonnage of a merchant ship.
- neurophysiologically — In terms of, or with regard to, neurophysiology.
- neuropsychologically — In terms of or by means of neuropsychology.
- night storage heater — a heater or radiator that stores heat at night-time because electricity is cheaper
- nikkei stock average — an index of prices on the Tokyo Stock Exchange
- no lack of something — If you say there is no lack of something, you are emphasizing that there is a great deal of it.
- non-volatile storage — (storage) (NVS, persistent storage, memory) A term describing a storage device whose contents are preserved when its power is off. Storage using magnetic media (e.g. magnetic disks, magnetic tape or bubble memory) is normally non-volatile by nature whereas semiconductor memories (static RAM and especially dynamic RAM) are normally volatile but can be made into non-volatile storage by having a (rechargable) battery permanently connected. Other examples of non-volatile storage are EEPROM, CD-ROM, paper tape and punched cards.
- noncondensing engine — a steam engine releasing exhaust steam to the atmosphere rather than condensing it to hot feedwater.
- nonintrusive testing — (testing) Testing that is transparent to the software under test, i.e., does not change its timing or processing characteristics. Nonintrusive testing usually involves additional hardware that collects timing or processing information and processes that information on another platform.
- norwegian forest cat — a breed of long-haired cat with a long bushy tail and a long mane
- nostalgie de la boue — a desire for or attraction to crudity, vulgarity, depravity, etc.
- occupation groupings — a system of classifying people according to occupation, based originally on information obtained by government census and subsequently developed by market research. The classifications are used by the advertising industry to identify potential markets. The groups are A, B, C1, C2, D, and E
- old english sheepdog — one of an English breed of large working dogs having a long, shaggy, gray or blue-merle and white coat that hangs over the eyes, and a bobbed tail, originally developed to drive sheep and cattle.
- omega-minus particle — a baryon with strangeness −3, isotopic spin 0, and negative charge; predicted from the mathematics of the Eightfold Way and subsequently discovered. Symbol: Ω −.
- on everyone's tongue — prevailing as common gossip