20-letter words containing i, g, u, a
- hydraulic fracturing — a process in which fractures in rocks below the earth's surface are opened and widened by injecting chemicals and liquids at high pressure: used especially to extract natural gas or oil.
- ignatius (of) loyola — Saint(born Iñigo López de Recalde) (1491-1556); Sp. priest: founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuit order): his day is July 31
- in (or out of) gear — (not) connected to the motor
- indistinguishability — The state of being indistinguishable.
- industrial espionage — the stealing of technological or commercial research data, blueprints, plans, etc., as by a person in the hire of a competing company.
- industrial sociology — the sociological study of social relationships and social structures in business settings.
- inertial upper stage — a U.S. two-stage, solid-propellant rocket used to boost a relatively heavy spacecraft from a low earth orbit into a planetary trajectory or an elliptical transfer orbit. Abbreviation: IUS.
- intravenous drug use — the injection of drugs intravenously
- judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
- junior featherweight — a boxer weighing up to 122 pounds (54.9 kg), between bantamweight and featherweight.
- kingston upon thames — a borough of Greater London, England.
- kruger national park — a wildlife sanctuary in NE South Africa: the world's largest game reserve. Area: over 21 700 sq km (8400 sq miles)
- 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
- light the touchpaper — to do something that will cause much anger or excitement
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- linguistic universal — language universal.
- logarithmic function — a function defined by y = log bx, especially when the base, b, is equal to e, the base of natural logarithms.
- logical construction — anything referred to by an incomplete symbol capable of contextual definition.
- longitude by account — the longitude of the position of a vessel as estimated by dead reckoning.
- longitudinal framing — a system for framing steel vessels in which light, closely spaced, longitudinal frames are connected by heavy, widely spaced transverse frames with deep webs.
- 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.
- lou gehrig's disease — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
- lymphogranulomatosis — widespread infectious granuloma of the lymphatic system.
- macias nguema biyogo — a former name of Bioko.
- macular degeneration — degeneration of the central portion of the retina, resulting in a loss of sharp vision.
- magdeburg hemisphere — one of a pair of hemispherical cups from which air can be evacuated when they are placed together: used to demonstrate the force of air pressure.
- magical mystery tour — something exciting and mysterious; esp an exploration of a new place where somebody being shown or taken around does not know where exactly they will be going
- mail-order catalogue — a catalogue of goods you can buy from a particular company by mail order
- 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.
- 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.
- maximum segment size — (networking) (MSS) The maximum amount of TCP data that a node can send in one segment. This should be the size of the receiver's reassembly buffer to try to avoid fragmentation. The equivalent at the physical layer is "Maximum Transmission Unit".
- medical underwriting — Medical underwriting is the use of medical or health status information in the evaluation of an applicant for life or health insurance.
- mexican jumping bean — jumping bean.
- mickey mouse program — (jargon) The North American equivalent of a "noddy program", i.e. trivial. The term doesn't necessarily have the belittling connotations of mainstream slang "Oh, that's just mickey mouse stuff!"; sometimes trivial programs can be very useful.
- microwave background — a background of microwave electromagnetic radiation with a black-body spectrum discovered in 1965, understood to be the thermal remnant of the big bang with which the universe began
- minimum lending rate — the official interest rate charged by the Bank of England and below which it will refrain from lending money.
- 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.
- mopping-up operation — an operation after a battle or campaign to root out remaining enemy forces or installations
- 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.
- mpeg-1 audio layer 1 — (audio, compression, algorithm) (MP1) A simple 32-subband audio compressor using a floating point representation for subband samples. Resolution and scale factor are stored for groups of 12 subsamples. MP1 is only used for Philips DCC Digital Compact cassette with data rates of 384 kbps.
- mpeg-1 audio layer 3 — (music, file format) (MP3) A digital audio compression algorithm that acheives a compression factor of about twelve while preserving sound quality. It does this by optimising the compression according to the range of sound that people can actually hear. MP3 is currently (July 1999) the most powerful algorithm in a series of audio encoding standards developed under the sponsorship of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and formalised by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). MP3 is very different from Layer 2, using an additional MDCT layer to increase frequency resolution. Its scale factor groups are more optimised for the human ear, and it uses nonlinear sample quantisation and Huffman coding. MP3 files (filename extension ".mp3") can be downloaded from many websites and can be played using software available for most operating systems (also downloadable), e.g. Winamp for PC, MacAmp for Macintosh, and mpeg123 for Unix. MP3 files are usually downloaded completely before playing but streaming MP3 is also possible. A program called a "ripper" can be used to copy a selection from a music CD onto your hard disk and another program called an encoder can convert it to an MP3 file.
- mpeg-2 audio layer 3 — (compression, standard, algorithm, file format) An extention of MPEG-1 audio layer 3 for lower sampling rates (16-24 kHz) targeting bit rates from 32-64 kbps (possibly 8-160 kbps). It is often combined with MPEG-2 LSF.
- multicast addressing — Ethernet addressing scheme used to send packets to devices of a certain type or for broadcasting to all nodes. The least significant bit of the most significant byte of a multi-cast address is one.
- multiplicative group — a group in which the operation of the group is multiplication.
- neighbourhood warden — a person employed by a local authority to patrol residential areas and deal with antisocial behaviour
- neurophysiologically — In terms of, or with regard to, neurophysiology.
- neuropsychologically — In terms of or by means of neuropsychology.
- nodding acquaintance — a slight, incomplete, or superficial knowledge (of something or someone): He had only a nodding acquaintance with Italian and didn't trust it to get him through the tour. Although we were neighbors for several years, we had only a nodding acquaintance.