20-letter words containing h, u, g, i, n
- public lending right — (in Britain) an act of Parliament that directs compensation to an author for the library loan of his or her book.
- pyroligneous alcohol — methyl alcohol.
- quaker meeting house — a place where Quakers gather for worship
- quarantine anchorage — an anchorage for ships awaiting a pratique.
- quick on the trigger — quick to fire a gun
- ring of the nibelung — Richard Wagner's tetralogy of music dramas: Das Rheingold (completed 1869), Die Walküre (completed 1870), Siegfried (completed 1876), and Götterdämmerung (completed 1876): the cycle was first performed at Bayreuth, 1876.
- rough-winged swallow — either of two New World swallows of the genus Stelgidopteryx, having outer primary feathers with small barblike hooks on the margins.
- scatter site housing — public housing, especially for low-income families, built throughout an urban area rather than being concentrated in a single neighborhood.
- schrodinger equation — the wave equation of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. Also called Schrödinger wave equation. Compare wave equation (def 2).
- shifting cultivation — a land-use system, esp in tropical Africa, in which a tract of land is cultivated until its fertility diminishes, when it is abandoned until this is restored naturally
- shoulder-length hair — hair that reaches a person's shoulders
- size-weight illusion — a standard sense illusion that a small object is heavier than a large object of the same weight
- slip through the net — If criminals slip through the net, they avoid being caught by the system or trap that was meant to catch them.
- sound-and-light show — a nighttime spectacle or performance, at which a building, historic site, etc., is illuminated and the historic significance is imparted to spectators by means of narration, sound effects, and music.
- the founding fathers — any of the men who were members of the U.S. Constituional Convention of 1787
- the garment industry — the manufacturing of items of clothing
- the gnomes of zurich — Swiss bankers and financiers
- the naughty nineties — (in Britain) the 1890s, considered to be a period of fun-loving and laxity, esp in sexual morals
- the thousand guineas — an annual horse race, restricted to fillies, run at Newmarket since 1814
- to bring up the rear — If a person or vehicle is bringing up the rear, they are the last person or vehicle in a moving line of them.
- to tighten your belt — If you have to tighten your belt, you have to spend less money and manage without things because you have less money than you used to have.
- triple witching hour — the last hour of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on the four Fridays each year when stock options, stock index futures, and options on such futures simultaneously expire: regarded as a time of extreme volatility in trading.
- tubing head pressure — The tubing head pressure is the pressure on the tubing, which is measured at the wellhead.
- visual merchandising — Visual merchandising is the use of attractive displays and floor plans to increase customer numbers and sales volumes.
- weights and measures — units or standards of measurement
- your marching orders — If you give someone their marching orders, you tell them that you no longer want or need them, for example as your employee or as your lover.
- yu-shiang whole fish — /yoo-shyang hohl fish/ An obsolete name for the Greek character gamma (extended SAIL ASCII code 9, Unicode glyph 0x0263) which with a loop in its tail looks like a little fish swimming down the page. The term is actually the name of a Chinese dish in which a fish is cooked whole (not parsed) and covered with Yu-Shiang (or Yu-Hsiang) sauce. Used primarily by people on the MIT LISP Machine, which could display this character on the screen. Tends to elicit incredulity from people who hear about it second-hand.