20-letter words containing i, s, o, t, n, c
- essential amino acid — an amino acid that cannot be synthesized in the body and is thus an essential component of the diet
- essential complexity — (programming) A measure of the "structuredness" of a program.
- feather in one's cap — one of the horny structures forming the principal covering of birds, consisting typically of a hard, tubular portion attached to the body and tapering into a thinner, stemlike portion bearing a series of slender, barbed processes that interlock to form a flat structure on each side.
- federal constitution — Constitution of the United States.
- financial consultant — A financial consultant is the same as a financial adviser.
- fission-track dating — the dating of samples of minerals by comparing the tracks in them by fission fragments of the uranium nuclei they contain, before and after irradiation by neutrons
- five-elements school — Yin-Yang School.
- fontainebleau school — a group of artists, many of them Italian and Flemish, who worked on the decorations of the palace of Fontainebleau in the 16th century.
- for sb's consumption — If you do or say something for a particular person's or group's consumption, you do or say it especially for them, although your private thoughts or plans may be very different.
- for sb's delectation — If you do something for someone's delectation, you do it to give them enjoyment or pleasure.
- frosting on the cake — a sweet mixture, cooked or uncooked, for coating or filling cakes, cookies, and the like; icing.
- glucosamine sulphate — a compound used in some herbal remedies and dietary supplements, esp to strengthen joint cartilage
- good driver discount — A good driver discount is a discount on insurance that is available to drivers who have no at-fault accidents and no traffic offenses during a particular period.
- 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.
- hyperadrenocorticism — Cushing's syndrome.
- hyperhomocysteinemia — (medicine) The presence of an excessive amount of homocysteine in the blood.
- immunohistochemistry — the application of immunologic techniques to the chemical analysis of cells and tissues.
- in contact (with sb) — If you are in contact with someone, you regularly meet them or communicate with them.
- 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
- incontrovertibleness — The quality of being incontrovertible.
- indicated horsepower — the horsepower of a reciprocating engine as shown by an indicator record. Abbreviation: ihp, IHP.
- industrial democracy — control of an organization by the people who work for it, esp by workers holding positions on its board of directors
- industrial sociology — the sociological study of social relationships and social structures in business settings.
- infectious hepatitis — hepatitis A.
- instruction mnemonic — (programming) A word or acronym used in assembly language to represent a binary machine instruction operation code. Different processors have different instruction sets and therefore use a different set of mnemonics to represent them. E.g. ADD, B (branch), BLT (branch if less than), SVC, MOVE, LDR (load register).
- instruction prefetch — (architecture) A technique which attempts to minimise the time a processor spends waiting for instructions to be fetched from memory. Instructions following the one currently being executed are loaded into a prefetch queue when the processor's external bus is otherwise idle. If the processor executes a branch instruction or receives an interrupt then the queue must be flushed and reloaded from the new address. Instruction prefetch is often combined with pipelining in an attempt to keep the pipeline busy. By 1995 most processors used prefetching, e.g. Motorola 680x0, Intel 80x86.
- 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.
- intermediate section — The intermediate section is the section of the borehole after the top hole, which has more consolidated rock.
- 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
- isometric projection — a type of axonometric projection in which the object is shown with its three principal axes all equally tilted from the plane of viewing, with two of them usually tilted 30 degrees upward from the horizontal
- joint life insurance — life insurance covering two or more persons, the benefits of which are paid after the first person dies.
- keratoconjunctivitis — inflammation of the cornea and conjunctiva.
- 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
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- menstrual extraction — an abortion procedure involving suction aspiration of the uterine contents early in gestation, before the first missed menstrual period: sometimes performed later.
- microcrystalline wax — Microcrystalline wax is a wax used as a stiffening agent and as a coating agent for tablets and capsules.