28-letter words containing m, a, n
- special power of appointment — authority to appoint persons from a particular class to take an estate or interest in property
- spectral luminous efficiency — a measure of the efficiency of radiation of a given wavelength in producing a visual sensation. It is equal to the ratio of the radiant flux at a standard wavelength to that at the given wavelength when the standard wavelength is chosen so that the maximum value of this ratio is unity
- standard normal distribution — a normal distribution with mean zero and variance 1, with probability density function [exp(–1⁄2x2)]/√2π
- sudden infant death syndrome — death from the sudden cessation of breathing (apnea) of a seemingly healthy infant, almost always during sleep, sometimes traceable to a chronic oxygen deficiency. Abbreviation: SIDS.
- supplemental security income — income provided by the U.S. government to needy aged, blind, and disabled persons. Abbreviation: SSI.
- systems administrators guild — (body, job) (SAGE) A special technical group of the USENIX Association.
- systems network architecture — (networking) (SNA) IBM's proprietary high level networking protocol standard, used by IBM and IBM compatible mainframes. Also referred to as "Blue Glue", SNA is a bletcherous protocol once widely favoured at commercial shops. The official IBM definition is "that which binds blue boxes together." It may be relevant that Blue Glue is also a 3M product commonly used to hold down carpets in dinosaur pens.
- take your eyes off something — When you take your eyes off the thing you have been watching or looking at, you stop looking at it.
- text reckoning and compiling — (language) (TRAC) An interactive macro generator language for string manipulation by Calvin N. Mooers and Peter Deutsch of Sun Microsystems. TAC derived ideas from Macro SAP. There are versions for PDP-1, PDP-8, PDP-10 and PDP-11. See also MINT, SAM76. E-mail: Preston Briggs <[email protected]>.
- the medical research council — a government body that uses public funds to finance research in medicine
- the world owes them a living — If you say that someone thinks that the world owes them a living, you are criticizing them because they think it is their right to have a comfortable life without having to make any effort at all.
- theophylline ethylenediamine — aminophylline.
- tissue plasminogen activator — an anticlotting enzyme, naturally occurring in small amounts in the blood.
- to be in someone's bad books — If you are in someone's bad books, they are annoyed with you. If you are in their good books, they are pleased with you.
- to beat someone's brains out — To beat someone's brains out or bash their brains in means to hit their head very hard, so that they are badly injured or killed.
- to come to a screeching halt — (of a motor vehicle) to stop suddenly, causing the brakes or tyres to produce a high-pitched sound
- to know something for a fact — If you say that you know something for a fact, you are emphasizing that you are completely certain that it is true.
- to make a clean breast of it — If you make a clean breast of something, you tell someone the truth about yourself or about something wrong that you have done.
- to make someone's blood boil — If you say that something makes your blood boil, you are emphasizing that it makes you very angry.
- to play into someone's hands — If you play into someone's hands, you do something which they want you to do and which places you in their power.
- to ruffle someone's feathers — To ruffle someone's feathers means to cause them to become very angry, nervous, or upset.
- to set/put sb's mind at rest — To put someone's mind at rest or set their mind at rest means to stop them worrying about something.
- to stand comparison with sth — If someone or something stands or bears comparison with another person or thing, they are as good, or almost as good.
- to take something lying down — If someone takes an insult or attack lying down, they accept it without protesting.
- to throw the book at someone — If someone in authority throws the book at someone who has committed an offence, they give the offender the greatest punishment that they are allowed to.
- tree transformation language — (functional programming) (TXL) A hybrid functional language and rule-based language developed by J.R. Cordy <[email protected]> et al of Queen's University, Canada in 1988. TXL is suitable for performing source to source analysis and transformation and for rapid prototyping of new languages and language processors. It uses structural transformation based on term rewriting. TXL has been particularly successful in software engineering tasks such as design recovery, refactoring, and reengineering. Most recently it has been applied to artificial intelligence tasks such as recognition of hand-written mathematics, and to transformation of structured documents in XML. TXL takes as input an arbitrary context-free grammar in extended BNF-like notation, and a set of show-by-example transformation rules to be applied to inputs parsed using the grammar. TXL supports the notion of agile parsing, the ability to tailor the grammar to each particular task using "grammar overrides".
- vendor independent messaging — (networking) (VIM) An electronic mail API promoted by an industry group headed by Lotus Development. VIM is a competitor to Microsoft's MAPI.
- very small aperture terminal — (communications) (VSAT) A kind of ground station used to contact a communications satellite such as INMARSAT.
- wake up and smell the coffee — to face up to reality, especially in an unpleasant situation
- war of american independence — American Revolution.
- waveform generation language — (testing) (WGL) A data description language for test program description.
- windows management interface — (Microsoft, system management) (WMI) Microsoft's implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management, a DMTF initiative to establish standards for accessing and sharing system management information over an enterprise network.
- work projects administration — WPA.
- you have the advantage of me — you know me but I do not know you
- zeroth law of thermodynamics — the principle that any two systems in thermal equilibrium with a third system are in thermal equilibrium with each other. Compare law of thermodynamics (def 2).