0%

18-letter words containing i, r, g, a, t

  • hearing impairment — partial deafness
  • heart-lung machine — a device through which blood is shunted temporarily for oxygenation during surgery, while the heart or a lung is being repaired.
  • heating degree-day — a degree-day below the standard temperature of 65°F or 19°C, used in estimating fuel consumption.
  • hell or high water — whatever difficulties may arise
  • hermaphrodite brig — a two-masted sailing vessel, square-rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft-rigged on the mainmast.
  • higher mathematics — the advanced portions of mathematics, customarily considered as embracing all beyond ordinary arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and trigonometry.
  • histomorphological — histology.
  • historical geology — the branch of geology dealing with the history of the earth.
  • horizontal tasting — a tasting of wines from the same year but from different vineyards, producers, etc.
  • human rights group — a group that campaigns for human rights
  • hungarian notation — (language, convention)   A linguistic convention requiring one or more letters to be added to the start of variable names to denote scope and/or type. Hungarian Notation is mainly confined to Microsoft Windows programming environments, such as Microsoft C, C++ and Visual Basic. It was originally devised by Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian, who was a senior programmer at Microsoft for many years. He disliked the way that names in C programs gave no clue as to the type, leading to frequent programmer errors. According to legend, fellow programmers at Microsoft, on seeing the convoluted, vowel-less variable names produced by his scheme, said, "This might as well be in Greek - or even Hungarian!". They made up the name "Hungarian notation" (possibly with "reverse Polish notation" in mind). Hungarian Notation is not really necessary when using a modern strongly-typed language as the compiler warns the programmer if a variable of one type is used as if it were another type. It is less useful in object-oriented programming languages such as C++, where many variables are going to be instances of classes and so begin with "obj". In addition, variable names are essentially only comments, and thus are just as susceptible to becoming out-of-date and incorrect as any other comment. For example, if a signed short int becomes an unsigned long int, the variable name, and every use of it, should be changed to reflect its new type. A variable's name should describe the values it holds. Type and scope are aspects of this, but Hungarian Notation overemphasises their importance by allocating so much of the start of the name to them. Furthermore, type and scope information can be found from the variable's declaration. Ironically, this is particularly easy in the development environments in which Hungarian Notation is typically used.
  • hypogastric artery — iliac artery (def 3).
  • imaginary operator — An imaginary operator is the part of a complex number that defines the magnitude of the part of the complex number at right angles to the real number part.
  • in (the) aggregate — If a number of different things or amounts are considered in aggregate, or in the aggregate, they are considered as a single thing or amount.
  • incidental charges — Incidental charges are costs of items and services that are not part of the main bill.
  • indiscriminatingly — In an indiscriminating manner.
  • induction training — training intended to enable new staff and recruits to do their work
  • industrial hygiene — the science that assesses, controls, and prevents occupational factors or sources of stress in the workplace that may significantly affect the health and well-being of employees or of the community in general
  • inquisitor-general — the head of the Spanish court of Inquisition
  • instrument landing — an aircraft landing accomplished by use of gauges on the instrument panel and ground-based radio equipment, with limited reference to outside visual signals.
  • integrated circuit — a circuit of transistors, resistors, and capacitors constructed on a single semiconductor wafer or chip, in which the components are interconnected to perform a given function. Abbreviation: IC.
  • integrated studies — a course that includes a number of subjects and is organized by theme
  • integrating factor — a factor that upon multiplying a differential equation with the right-hand side equal to zero makes the equation integrable, usually by making the resulting expression an exact differential of some function.
  • intercartilaginous — (anatomy) Within cartilage.
  • interchangeability — (of two things) capable of being put or used in the place of each other: interchangeable symbols.
  • interlacing arcade — an arcade, especially a blind one, composed of arches (interlacing arches) so arranged and cut that each arch seems to intersect and be intersected by one or more other arches.
  • internationalizing — Present participle of internationalize.
  • interrogation mark — Also called interrogation point, interrogation mark. a mark indicating a question: usually, as in English, the mark (?) placed after a question.
  • intimate borrowing — the borrowing of linguistic forms by one language or dialect from another when both occupy a single geographical or cultural community.
  • investment manager — financial advisor
  • iomega corporation — (company, storage)   A storage device manufacturer whose major products are the Zip and Jaz removable disk drives and Ditto tape drives. They became popular with an early product called the Bernoulli Box. These products fall in line with their focus set in 1994 "to help people manage their stuff". The company's stated aim is to create portable, fast, large and cheap storage solutions. Iomega's major competitor in the growing market for removable disks is SyQuest, who seem to always be a few weeks behind them. In general, Iomega target the Small Office/Home Office. They are also investigating the growing digital photography market which also needs large removable storage devices. Iomega's president and CEO is Kim Edwards. They have nearly 2000 employees in offices world-wide. Revenue for the quarter ending Dec 1996 was $371 million and net income was $20 million. Headquarters: Roy, Utah, USA.
  • ionizing radiation — any radiation, as a stream of alpha particles or x-rays, that produces ionization as it passes through a medium.
  • ip next generation — Internet Protocol version 6
  • junior heavyweight — a boxer weighing up to 190 pounds (85.5 kg), between light heavyweight and heavyweight.
  • 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
  • knight of the road — a tramp
  • labeled bracketing — a representation of the constituent structure of a string, as a word or sentence, comparable to a tree diagram, in which each constituent is shown in brackets and given a subscript grammatical label, with each bracketed item corresponding to a node in a tree diagram.
  • lactogenic hormone — prolactin.
  • law of gravitation — a law stating that any two masses attract each other with a force equal to a constant (constant of gravitation) multiplied by the product of the two masses and divided by the square of the distance between them.
  • 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.
  • lean manufacturing — efficiency in the production of goods
  • legislative branch — the branch of government having the power to make laws; the legislature.
  • lieutenant general — a commissioned officer ranking next below a general and next above a major general.
  • lighting cameraman — the person who designs and supervises the lighting of scenes to be filmed
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Was this page helpful?
Yes No
Thank you for your feedback! Tell your friends about this page
Tell us why?