20-letter words containing i, n, s, c, a
- have had one's chips — to be defeated, condemned to die, killed, etc
- heat of condensation — the heat liberated by a unit mass of gas at its boiling point as it condenses to a liquid: equal to the heat of vaporization.
- horizontal scan rate — (hardware) (HSR) The measure of how many scan lines of pixels a monitor can display in one second, expressed in kHz (generally somewhere between 20 and 100 kHz). The HSR is controlled by the horizontal sync signal generated by the video controller, but is limited by the speed with which the monitor can scan the electron beam horizontally across the screen and then return it to the beginning of the next line.
- household appliances — devices or machines, usually electrical, that are in your home and which you use to do jobs such as cleaning or cooking
- hydraulic suspension — a system of motor-vehicle suspension using hydraulic members, often with hydraulic compensation between front and rear systems (hydroelastic suspension)
- hyperadrenocorticism — Cushing's syndrome.
- hyperhomocysteinemia — (medicine) The presence of an excessive amount of homocysteine in the blood.
- in a class by itself — unique
- in bad circumstances — (of a person) in a bad financial situation
- in case/just in case — If you do something in case or just in case a particular thing happens, you do it because that thing might happen.
- in contact (with sb) — If you are in contact with someone, you regularly meet them or communicate with them.
- in the circumstances — a condition, detail, part, or attribute, with respect to time, place, manner,agent, etc., that accompanies, determines, or modifies a fact or event; a modifying or influencing factor: Do not judge his behavior without considering every circumstance.
- in-service education — training and education given to employed teachers throughout their career
- income tax inspector — a person whose job is to assess individuals' income tax liability
- incremental analysis — (testing) Partial analysis of an incomplete product to allow early feedback on its development.
- indicated horsepower — the horsepower of a reciprocating engine as shown by an indicator record. Abbreviation: ihp, IHP.
- inductive statistics — the branch of statistics dealing with conclusions, generalizations, predictions, and estimations based on data from samples.
- industrial democracy — control of an organization by the people who work for it, esp by workers holding positions on its board of directors
- industrial insurance — industrial life insurance.
- industrial sociology — the sociological study of social relationships and social structures in business settings.
- inelastic scattering — a scattering of particles due to an inelastic collision that also changes their wavelengths and phases.
- infectious hepatitis — hepatitis A.
- insulin-coma therapy — a former treatment for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, employing insulin-induced hypoglycemia as a method for producing convulsive seizures.
- integrity constraint — (database) A constraint (rule) that must remain true for a database to preserve data integrity. Integrity constraints are specified at database creation time and enforced by the database management system. Examples from a genealogical database would be that every individual must be their parent's child or that they can have no more than two natural parents.
- intercalary meristem — meristem in the internode of a stem.
- intermediate section — The intermediate section is the section of the borehole after the top hole, which has more consolidated rock.
- interplanetary space — the region of space occurring around the sun and planets of the solar system. The density is normally negligible although cosmic rays, meteorites, gas clouds, etc, can occur
- into/in cold storage — If you put an idea or plan into cold storage or in cold storage, you delay it for a while rather than acting on it as you originally intended.
- isochronous transfer — isochronous
- jerk someone's chain — to tease, mislead, or harass someone
- joint life insurance — life insurance covering two or more persons, the benefits of which are paid after the first person dies.
- judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
- keratoconjunctivitis — inflammation of the cornea and conjunctiva.
- king charles spaniel — a variety of the English toy spaniel having a black-and-tan coat.
- labour-saving device — a machine, gadget, etc, that reduces (human) effort, hard work or labour
- land-office business — a lively, booming, expanding, or very profitable business.
- 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
- last of the mohicans — a historical novel (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper.
- lead with one's chin — to act so imprudently as to invite disaster
- 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.
- like a ton of bricks — (used esp of the manner of punishing or reprimanding someone) with great force; severely
- linear address space — A memory addressing scheme used in processors where the whole memory can be accessed using a single address that fits in a single register or instruction. This contrasts with a segmented memory architecture, such as that used on the Intel 8086, where an address is given by an offset from a base address held in one of the "segment registers". Linear addressing greatly simplifies programming at the assembly language level but requires more instruction word bits to be allocated for an address.
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- linguistic universal — language universal.
- 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
- 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.
- lunisolar precession — the principal component of the precession of the equinoxes, produced by the gravitational attraction of the sun and the moon on the equatorial bulge of the earth.
- 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.