18-letter words containing g, s
- investment casting — a casting process in which an expendable pattern is surrounded by an investment compound and then baked so that the investment is hardened to form a mold and the pattern material may be melted and run off.
- investment manager — financial advisor
- invisible earnings — earnings from services provided rather than goods
- iphigenia in aulis — a tragedy (408? b.c.) by Euripides.
- iverson's language — APL, which went unnamed for many years.
- james-lange theory — a theory that emotions are caused by bodily sensations; for example, we are sad because we weep
- johannes gutenberg — Johannes [yoh-hahn-uh s] /yoʊˈhɑn əs/ (Show IPA), (Johann Gensfleisch) c1400–68, German printer: credited with invention of printing from movable type.
- jump through hoops — If someone makes you jump through hoops, they make you do lots of difficult or boring things in order to please them or achieve something.
- junior high school — a school attended after elementary school and usually consisting of grades seven through nine.
- kansas gay-feather — prairie button snakeroot.
- kentucky bluegrass — a grass, Poa pratensis, of the Mississippi valley, used for pasturage and lawns.
- king james version — Authorized Version.
- king of the castle — most powerful figure
- king of the forest — the oak tree.
- king william's war — the war (1689–97) in which England and its American colonies and Indian allies opposed France and its Indian allies and which constituted the American phase of the War of the Grand Alliance.
- king's regulations — (in Britain and the Commonwealth when the sovereign is male) the code of conduct for members of the armed forces that deals with discipline, aspects of military law, etc
- king-of-the-salmon — a ribbonfish, Trachypterus altivelis, of northern parts of the Pacific Ocean.
- kingston upon hull — official name of Hull.
- kingston-upon-hull — official name of Hull.
- kirkcudbrightshire — a historic county in SW Scotland.
- knights of pythias — a fraternal order founded in Washington, D.C., in 1864.
- lagrange's theorem — the theorem that the order of each subgroup of a finite group is a factor of the order of the group.
- landscape gardener — sb who designs gardens
- landscape painting — art: depicting natural scenery
- language universal — a trait or property of language that exists, or has the potential to exist, in all languages.
- law of segregation — the principle, originated by Gregor Mendel, stating that during the production of gametes the two copies of each hereditary factor segregate so that offspring acquire one factor from each parent.
- laying on of hands — Theology. a rite in which the cleric's hands are placed on the head of a person being confirmed, ordained, or the like.
- legislative branch — the branch of government having the power to make laws; the legislature.
- lifesaving service — a private organization or government agency for general marine rescue operations.
- light displacement — the weight of a ship with all its permanent equipment, excluding the weight of cargo, persons, ballast, dunnage, and fuel, but usually including the weight of permanent ballast and water used to operate steam machinery.
- lightning arrester — a device for preventing damage to radio, telephonic, or other electric equipment from lightning or other high-voltage currents, using spark gaps to carry the current to the ground without passing through the device.
- limburger (cheese) — a semisoft cheese of whole milk, with a strong odor and flavor, made originally in Limburg, Belgium
- limit-state design — a design criterion specifying that with acceptable probabilities a structure will not reach a limit state in which it either is unfit for the use for which it was designed (unavailability limit state) or fails (ultimate limit state)
- lithostratigraphic — Of or pertaining to lithostratigraphy.
- logarithmic spiral — log r = aθ
- logarithmus dualis — (mathematics) (ld) Latin for logarithm base two. More commonly written as "log" with a subscript "2". Roughly the number of bits required to represent an integer.
- logical positivism — a philosophical movement that stresses the function of philosophy as a method of criticizing and analyzing science and that rejects all transcendental metaphysics, statements of fact being held to be meaningful only if they have verifiable consequences in experience and in statements of logic, mathematics, or philosophy itself, and with such statements of fact deriving their validity from the rules of language.
- logical positivist — an exponent or follower of logical positivism
- logical shift left — logical shift
- logically possible — capable of being described without self-contradiction
- long-distance call — phone call: not local area
- long-hours culture — The long-hours culture is the way in which some workers feel that they are expected to work much longer hours than they are paid to do.
- long-stay car park — a car park (eg at an airport) where cars can be left for a long time
- looking-glass self — the self-image an individual forms by imagining what others think of his or her behavior and appearance.
- love-lies-bleeding — an amaranth, especially Amaranthus caudatus, having spikes of crimson flowers.
- low-start mortgage — a mortgage in which interest only is repaid for a fixed period at the outset, to make it more affordable
- lubber grasshopper — plains grasshopper.
- madagascar jasmine — a Madagascan twining, woody vine, Stephanotis floribunda, of the milkweed family, having waxy-white, fragrant flowers.
- magic switch story — Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no-one knows who). You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labelled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words "magic" and "more magic". The switch was in the "more magic" position. I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side. It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed. Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the "more magic" position before reviving the computer. A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the "more magic" position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch. The computer promptly crashed. This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since. We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic. I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on "more magic".
- magistrate's court — a court having limited jurisdiction over minor civil and criminal matters, as matters of contract not exceeding a particular amount of money.