21-letter words containing l, i, m, e
- maître d'hôtel butter — melted butter mixed with parsley and lemon juice
- majority shareholding — a holding of more than half a company's shares
- make a pig of oneself — If you say that someone is making a pig of themselves, you are criticizing them for eating a very large amount at one meal.
- make a policy paid up — If you make a policy paid up, you stop making premium payments into a life policy but still leave the coverage in place.
- make one's blood boil — the fluid that circulates in the principal vascular system of human beings and other vertebrates, in humans consisting of plasma in which the red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets are suspended.
- make up for lost time — compensate for past inaction
- maple-leaved viburnum — dockmackie.
- marketable securities — Marketable securities are securities that can easily be sold quickly on the open market.
- maximum value theorem — the theorem that for a real-valued function f whose domain is a compact set, there is at least one element x in the domain of f for which f (x) achieves its largest value.
- mechanical instrument — a musical instrument, such as a barrel organ or music box, that plays a preselected piece of music by mechanical means
- mechanical metallurgy — the branch of metallurgy dealing with the response of metals to applied forces.
- mechanical solidarity — social cohesiveness that is based on shared activities, beliefs, and experiences and is characteristic of simple traditional societies.
- mechanical suspension — the act of suspending.
- mechanical weathering — any of the various weathering processes that cause physical disintegration of exposed rock without any change in the chemical composition of the rock: Collision between rock surfaces can cause mechanical weathering.
- medical jurisprudence — forensic medicine.
- medical social worker — a person who works in a hospital and is responsible for offering counselling to patients and their families and ensuring that discharged patients will receive appropriate care in the community
- mediterranean climate — a climate characterized by warm, dry summers and rainy winters
- medium access control — Media Access Control
- megaloblastic anaemia — any anaemia, esp pernicious anaemia, characterized by the presence of megaloblasts in the blood or bone marrow
- mengistu haile mariam — born 1937, Ethiopian political leader: head of state 1977–87; president 1987–91.
- meter-kilogram-second — of or relating to the system of units in which the meter, kilogram, and second are the principal units of length, mass, and time. Abbreviation: mks, MKS.
- methylisothiazolinone — (chemistry) A powerful biocide and preservative within the group of isothiazolinones, used in shampoos etc.
- methyltrinitrobenzene — TNT.
- metopon hydrochloride — a narcotic drug, C18H21O3N·HCl, derived from morphine, but slightly more potent: used in medicine to relieve pain
- metropolitan district — any of the districts making up the metropolitan counties of England: since 1986 they have functioned as unitary authorities, forming the sole principal tier of local government. Each metropolitan district has an elected council responsible for education, social services, etc
- model-view-controller — (programming) (MVC) A way of partitioning the design of interactive software; a software architecture pattern. The "model" is the internal workings of the program (the data objects and algorithms), the "view" is how the user sees the state of the model and the "controller" is how the user changes the state or provides input. MVC was the original kind of what is now sometimes called an MV* pattern. Trygve Reenskaug introduced it into Smalltalk-76 while visiting Xerox PARC in the 1970s.
- modulus of elasticity — the ratio of the stress applied to a body or substance to the resulting strain within the elastic limit
- mohammed reza pahlavi — 1919-80; shah of Iran (1941-79); deposed
- monochloroacetic acid — chloroacetic acid.
- motherwell and wishaw — a burgh in the Motherwell district, in S Scotland.
- motivational research — the application of the knowledge and techniques of the social sciences, especially psychology and sociology, to understanding consumer attitudes and behavior: used as a guide in advertising and marketing.
- mucopolysaccharidoses — Plural form of mucopolysaccharidosis.
- multi-level marketing — Multi-level marketing is a marketing technique which involves people buying a product, then earning a commission by selling it to their friends. The abbreviation MLM is also used.
- multi-ringed compound — A multi-ringed compound is a compound which has 70 or more carbon atoms, often a residual compound.
- multichannel analyser — an electronic instrument, such as a pulse height analyser, that splits an input waveform into a large number of channels in accordance with a particular parameter of the input
- multilayer perceptron — A network composed of more than one layer of neurons, with some or all of the outputs of each layer connected to one or more of the inputs of another layer. The first layer is called the input layer, the last one is the output layer, and in between there may be one or more hidden layers.
- multiplex transmitter — a transmitter that sends signals by multiplex
- muon-catalysed fusion — an experimental form of nuclear fusion in which hydrogen and deuterium muonic atoms are formed. Because the mass of the muon is much larger than that of the electron, the atoms are smaller, and the nuclei are close enough for fusion to occur
- negotiable instrument — order or promise to pay money
- network filing system — (spelling) Misnomer for Network File System.
- network time protocol — (NTP) A protocol built on top of TCP/IP that assures accurate local timekeeping with reference to radio, atomic or other clocks located on the Internet. This protocol is capable of synchronizing distributed clocks within milliseconds over long time periods. It is defined in STD 12, RFC 1119.
- night-blooming cereus — any of various cacti of the genera Hylocereus, Peniocereus, Nyctocereus, or Selenicereus, having large, usually white flowers that open at night.
- nightmare file system — Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher spl level). Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the entire network of machines is frozen - worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great misfeature). ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s. See also broadcast storm.
- nine-banded armadillo — an armadillo, Dasypus novemcinctus, of the southern U.S. to Argentina, having nine hinged bands of bony plates, the female of which usually gives birth to quadruplets that are always of the same sex.
- non-maintainer upload — (operating system) (NMU) A release of a Debian package by someone other than its usual maintainer. E.g. "The bug was fixed in a recent NMU."
- non-repeating decimal — a decimal representation of any irrational number, having the property that no sequence of digits is repeated ad infinitum.
- northumberland strait — the part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence that separates Prince Edward Island from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in SE Canada. About 200 miles (320 km) long; 9–30 miles (15–48 km) wide.
- oil-in-water emulsion — An oil-in-water emulsion is a mixture in which an oily medicine is dispersed in water or other liquid.
- one-dimensional array — (types) An array with only one dimension; the simplest kind of array, consisting of a sequence of items ("elements"), all of the same type. An element is selected by an integer index that normally starts at zero for the first element and increases by one. The index of the last element is thus the length of the array minus one. A one-dimensional array is also known as a vector. It should not be confused with a list. In some languages, e.g. Perl, all arrays are one-dimensional and higher dimensions are represented as arrays of pointers to arrays (which can have different sizes and can themselves contain pointers to arrays and so on). A one-dimensional array maps simply to memory: the address of an element with index i is A(i) = A0 + i * s where A0 is the base address of the array and s is the size of storage used for each element, the "stride". Elements may be padded to certain address boundaries, e.g. machine words, to increase access speed, in which case the stride will be larger than the amount of data in an element.
- operational amplifier — a high-gain, high-input impedance amplifier, usually an integrated circuit, that can perform mathematical operations when suitably wired.