20-letter words containing m, c, a
- hire-purchase system — a system of payment for a commodity in regular installments while using it.
- honeysuckle ornament — anthemion.
- horizontal microcode — (processor) Microcode using horizontal encoding.
- hudson's bay company — a company chartered in England in 1670 to carry on fur trading with the Indians in North America.
- human genome project — a federally funded U.S. scientific project to identify both the genes and the entire sequence of DNA base pairs that make up the human genome.
- hyperadrenocorticism — Cushing's syndrome.
- hypercholesterolemia — the presence of an excessive amount of cholesterol in the blood.
- hyperhomocysteinemia — (medicine) The presence of an excessive amount of homocysteine in the blood.
- implicit parallelism — (parallel) A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which decides automatically which parts to run in parallel. The best way of providing implicit parallelism is still (1995) an active research topic. The problem is to generate the right number of parallel tasks of the right size (or "granularity"). Too many tasks and the system gets bogged down in house-keeping, or memory for waiting tasks runs out, too few tasks and processors are left idle. The best performance is usually achieved with explicit parallelism where the programmer can annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks.
- imported currantworm — the larva of any of several insects, as a sawfly, Nematus ribesii (imported currantworm) which infests and feeds on the leaves and fruit of currants.
- in bad circumstances — (of a person) in a bad financial situation
- in the circumstances — a condition, detail, part, or attribute, with respect to time, place, manner,agent, etc., that accompanies, determines, or modifies a fact or event; a modifying or influencing factor: Do not judge his behavior without considering every circumstance.
- in the public domain — able to be discussed and examined freely by the general public
- in-car entertainment — In-car entertainment is a sound system consisting of, for example, a radio or compact disc player, that is designed for easy operation by the driver, and to be unaffected by vibration. In larger vehicles, this system can include television and DV
- income tax inspector — a person whose job is to assess individuals' income tax liability
- incomplete dominance — the appearance in a heterozygote of a trait that is intermediate between either of the trait's homozygous phenotypes.
- incorporated company — a legally constituted company
- incremental analysis — (testing) Partial analysis of an incomplete product to allow early feedback on its development.
- incremental recorder — a device for recording data as it is generated, usually on paper tape or magnetic tape, and feeding it into a computer
- indian cucumber root — a North American plant, Medeola virginiana, of the lily family, having whorled leaves, nodding, greenish-yellow flowers, and an edible root.
- industrial democracy — control of an organization by the people who work for it, esp by workers holding positions on its board of directors
- information exchange — discussion that involves exchanging ideas and knowledge
- insulin-coma therapy — a former treatment for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, employing insulin-induced hypoglycemia as a method for producing convulsive seizures.
- intercalary meristem — meristem in the internode of a stem.
- intermediate section — The intermediate section is the section of the borehole after the top hole, which has more consolidated rock.
- james prescott joule — James Prescott, 1818–89, English physicist.
- java message service — (programming, messaging) (JMS) An API for accessing enterprise messaging systems from Java programs. Java Message Service, part of the J2EE suite, provides standard APIs that Java developers can use to access the common features of enterprise message systems. JMS supports the publish/subscribe and point-to-point models and allows the creation of message types consisting of arbitrary Java objects. JMS provides support for administration, security, error handling, and recovery, optimisation, distributed transactions, message ordering, message acknowledgment, and more.
- java virtual machine — (language, architecture) (JVM) A specification for software which interprets Java programs that have been compiled into byte-codes, and usually stored in a ".class" file. The JVM instruction set is stack-oriented, with variable instruction length. Unlike some other instruction sets, the JVM's supports object-oriented programming directly by including instructions for object method invocation (similar to subroutine call in other instruction sets). The JVM itself is written in C and so can be ported to run on most platforms. It needs thread support and I/O (for dynamic class loading). The Java byte-code is independent of the platform. There are also some hardware implementations of the JVM.
- jerk someone's chain — to tease, mislead, or harass someone
- jordan curve theorem — the theorem that the complement of a simple closed curve can be expressed as the union of two disjoint sets, each having as boundary the given curve.
- justifiable homicide — murder committed under extenuating circumstances
- lampbrush chromosome — a chromosome with looped projections resembling a brush
- last of the mohicans — a historical novel (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper.
- lavaliere microphone — a small microphone that hangs around the neck of a performer or speaker.
- lead someone a dance — to cause someone continued worry and exasperation; play up
- lieutenant commander — a commissioned officer ranking next below a commander and next above a lieutenant.
- 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.
- lifetime achievement — the notable successes that someone achieves during their life
- logarithmic function — a function defined by y = log bx, especially when the base, b, is equal to e, the base of natural logarithms.
- lonely hearts column — the part of a newspaper or magazine where lonely hearts ads appear
- macias nguema biyogo — a former name of Bioko.
- macular degeneration — degeneration of the central portion of the retina, resulting in a loss of sharp vision.
- madwoman of chaillot — a satirical comedy (1945) by Jean Giraudoux.
- magical mystery tour — something exciting and mysterious; esp an exploration of a new place where somebody being shown or taken around does not know where exactly they will be going
- magnetic card reader — a device that scans and interprets information from a card with a magnetic stripe
- magnetic coefficient — any of various factors affecting the sensitivity of a ship's magnetic compass as a result of its construction or environment.
- magnetic declination — variation (def 8).
- magnetic inclination — to plunge (something, as a cloth or sponge) temporarily into a liquid, so as to moisten it, dye it, or cause it to take up some of the liquid: He dipped the brush into the paint bucket.
- 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.