20-letter words containing m, a, n, p, o
- 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.
- 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.
- magnetoencephalogram — a record of the magnetic field of the brain. Abbreviation: MEG.
- mail transport agent — Message Transfer Agent
- malpighian corpuscle — Also called kidney corpuscle, Malpighian body. the structure at the beginning of a vertebrate nephron, consisting of a glomerulus and its surrounding Bowman's capsule.
- marginal probability — (in a multivariate distribution) the probability of one variable taking a specific value irrespective of the values of the others
- material implication — equivalence (def 4a).
- maternal deprivation — the lack of a mother in a child's life, considered a cause of psychological problems later in life
- medical practitioner — doctor
- megabytes per second — (unit) (MBps, MB/s) Millions of bytes per second. A unit of data rate. 1 MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes per second (not 1,048,576).
- 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.
- minkowski space-time — a four-dimensional space in which three coordinates specify the position of a point in space and the fourth represents the time at which an event occurred at that point
- missionary apostolic — an honorary title conferred by the pope on certain missionaries.
- mopping-up operation — an operation after a battle or campaign to root out remaining enemy forces or installations
- multipart stationery — continuous stationery comprising two or more sheets, either carbonless or with carbon paper between the sheets
- multiple personality — a rare disorder in which an individual displays several functionally dissociated personalities, each of a complexity comparable to that of a normal individual.
- multiplication table — Arithmetic. a tabular listing of the products of any two numbers of a set, usually of the integers 1 through 10 or 1 through 12.
- multistep hydroplane — a motorship having a flat bottom built as a series of planes inclined forward, the ship planing on each from stem to stern as its speed increases.
- neapolitan ice cream — variously flavored and colored ice cream and ice mixtures frozen in layers.
- neon lamp (or tube) — a discharge lamp containing neon, that ionizes and glows with a red light (neon light) when an electric current is sent through it: used esp. in advertising signs
- new democratic party — the Canadian social democratic party formed in 1961
- next program counter — (architecture) (nPC) A register in a CPU that contains the address of the instruction to be executed next.
- non-optimal solution — (Or "sub-optimal solution") An astoundingly stupid way to do something. This term is generally used in deadpan sarcasm, as its impact is greatest when the person speaking looks completely serious. See also Bad Thing.
- nonrepeating decimal — a decimal representation of any irrational number, having the property that no sequence of digits is repeated ad infinitum.
- north american plate — a major tectonic division of the earth's crust, comprising Greenland and the continent of North America and the suboceanic Labrador and North American Basins, and bounded on the east by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, on the south by the Caribbean and South American Plates, and on the west by the San Andreas fault and Aleutian Trench.
- north temperate zone — the part of the earth's surface between the tropic of Cancer and the Arctic Circle.
- omega-minus particle — a baryon with strangeness −3, isotopic spin 0, and negative charge; predicted from the mathematics of the Eightfold Way and subsequently discovered. Symbol: Ω −.
- one's spiritual home — Your spiritual home is the place where you feel that you belong, usually because your ideas or attitudes are the same as those of the people who live there.
- ophthalmodynamometer — a device for determining the nearest point of ocular convergence.
- optical mark reading — the reading of marks by an optical device whereby the information can be stored in machine-readable form
- pale western cutworm — the larva of a noctuid moth, Agrotis orthogonia, of the western U.S. and Canada, that seriously damages grains, beets, potatoes, alfalfa, etc., by feeding underground on roots and stems.
- parametric equations — one of two or more equations expressing the location of a point on a curve or surface by determining each coordinate separately.
- paranoid programming — (programming) A programming style that tries to prepare for the worst external conditions, including incorrect input, resource limitations, hardware and software failure and even can't happen errors, to the fullest possible extent. While some believe in the motto "professional programming is paranoid programming", the expression usually has the connotation that the efforts are unnecessary or too costly ("Maybe this code is just paranoid programming, but I think it is necessary to avoid a possible overflow condition".)
- parkinson's syndrome — a complex of symptoms indistinguishable from Parkinson's disease, commonly affecting boxers or sometimes occurring as a result of substance abuse or an encephalitic infection.
- particle beam weapon — a weapon that fires particle beams into the atmosphere or space
- pass in one's marble — to die
- patent foramen ovale — a congenital heart defect resulting from failure of the foramen ovale to close shortly after birth.
- paternal grandmother — the mother of someone's father
- pentobarbital sodium — a barbiturate drug used in medicine as a sedative and hypnotic. Formula: C11H17N2O3Na
- peremptory challenge — a formal objection to the service of a juror by a party to a criminal prosecution or a civil action that requires no showing of cause.
- periodontal membrane — the collagenous, fibrous connective tissue between the cementum of the tooth and the alveolus.
- permonosulfuric acid — persulfuric acid (def 1).
- personnel department — business: human resources
- personnel management — the branch of management dealing with staff recruitment and matters relating to employees
- phenyldiethanolamine — a white, crystalline, slightly water-soluble substance, C 1 0 H 1 5 NO 2 , used in the manufacture of dyes and in organic synthesis.
- physical examination — an examination, usually by a physician, of a person's body in order to determine his or her state of health or physical fitness, as for military service or participation in a sport.
- pick someone's brain — to obtain information or ideas from someone
- pickwickian syndrome — an abnormality characterized by extreme obesity accompanied by sleepiness, hypoventilation, and polycythemia.
- pico della mirandola — Count Giovanni [jaw-vahn-nee] /dʒɔˈvɑn ni/ (Show IPA), 1463–94, Italian humanist and writer.