20-letter words containing i, m, a, t
- life-support machine — A life-support machine is the equipment that is used to keep a person alive when they are very ill and cannot breathe without help.
- lifetime achievement — the notable successes that someone achieves during their life
- like death warmed up — very ill
- linage advertisement — advertisements which are costed and paid for according to the number of lines in them
- literate programming — (programming, text) Combining the use of a text formatting language such as TeX and a conventional programming language so as to maintain documentation and source code together. Literate programming may use the inverse comment convention.
- logarithmic function — a function defined by y = log bx, especially when the base, b, is equal to e, the base of natural logarithms.
- 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.
- lower yosemite falls — a section of Yosemite Falls in central California, in the Yosemite National Park, that is 98 m (320 ft) high
- lump in one's throat — the passage from the mouth to the stomach or to the lungs, including the pharynx, esophagus, larynx, and trachea.
- lymphogranulomatosis — widespread infectious granuloma of the lymphatic system.
- macular degeneration — degeneration of the central portion of the retina, resulting in a loss of sharp vision.
- madwoman of chaillot — a satirical comedy (1945) by Jean Giraudoux.
- 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
- magnetic card reader — a device that scans and interprets information from a card with a magnetic stripe
- magnetic coefficient — any of various factors affecting the sensitivity of a ship's magnetic compass as a result of its construction or environment.
- magnetic declination — variation (def 8).
- magnetic inclination — to plunge (something, as a cloth or sponge) temporarily into a liquid, so as to moisten it, dye it, or cause it to take up some of the liquid: He dipped the brush into the paint bucket.
- 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.
- magnification factor — the size of a magnified image of an object divided by the size of the object itself
- mail transport agent — Message Transfer Agent
- mail-order catalogue — a catalogue of goods you can buy from a particular company by mail order
- maintenance and cure — the right of an injured sailor to support and medical treatment.
- maintenance contract — a formal agreement between two parties which states that one party will keep a building, vehicle, machine, etc, belonging to the other party in good condition by regularly checking it and repairing it when necessary
- 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)
- make short shrift of — to dispose of quickly and unsympathetically
- management committee — a committee of managers or senior members of an organization who are in charge of directing that organization
- mannitol hexanitrate — a colorless, crystalline, water-insoluble, explosive solid, C 6 H 8 N 6 O 1 8 , used as a fulminating agent in percussion caps and in the treatment of hypertension and coronary insufficiency.
- mare tranquillitatis — (Sea of Tranquillity) a dark plain in the first quadrant of the face of the moon: about 110,000 sq. mi. (285,000 sq. km).
- marginal probability — (in a multivariate distribution) the probability of one variable taking a specific value irrespective of the values of the others
- maria theresa thaler — a former silver coin of Austria, issued between 1740 and 1780 and used for trade with Ethiopia and other countries; Levant dollar.
- marketing department — the department of a commercial organization that deals with the marketing of products
- 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.
- marriage certificate — official document recording a marriage
- 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.
- master of ceremonies — a person who directs the entertainment at a party, dinner, nightclub, radio or television broadcast, or the like, acting as host and introducing the speakers or performers. Abbreviation: M.C., MC.
- matched-pairs design — (of an experiment) concerned with measuring the values of the dependent variables for pairs of subjects that have been matched to eliminate individual differences and that are respectively subjected to the control and the experimental condition
- material equivalence — equivalence (def 4b).
- material implication — equivalence (def 4a).
- material-equivalence — the state or fact of being equivalent; equality in value, force, significance, etc.
- maternal deprivation — the lack of a mother in a child's life, considered a cause of psychological problems later in life
- 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".
- 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.
- mechanical advantage — the ratio of output force to the input force applied to a mechanism.
- media access control — (networking) (MAC) The lower sublayer of the OSI data link layer. The interface between a node's Logical Link Control and the network's physical layer. The MAC differs for various physical media. See also MAC Address, Ethernet, IEEE 802.3, token ring.
- medical practitioner — doctor
- medical underwriting — Medical underwriting is the use of medical or health status information in the evaluation of an applicant for life or health insurance.
- megakaryocytopoiesis — (biology) The cellular development process that leads to platelet production.
- member of parliament — A Member of Parliament is a person who has been elected by the people in a particular area to represent them in a country's parliament. The abbreviation MP is often used.