20-letter words containing m, e, t, a, p, s
- houses of parliament — In Britain, the Houses of Parliament are the British parliament, which consists of two parts, the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The buildings where the British parliament does its work are also called the Houses of Parliament.
- 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.
- income tax inspector — a person whose job is to assess individuals' income tax liability
- inland revenue stamp — a certificate issued by the Inland Revenue to acknowledge payment of tax
- innerspring mattress — a mattress with built-in coil springs
- insulin-coma therapy — a former treatment for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, employing insulin-induced hypoglycemia as a method for producing convulsive seizures.
- james prescott joule — James Prescott, 1818–89, English physicist.
- joseph of arimathaea — a member of the Sanhedrin who placed the body of Jesus in the tomb. Matt. 27:57–60; Mark 15:43.
- kamin's interpreters — (language, tool) A set of interpreters for Pascal, Lisp, APL, Scheme, SASL, CLU, Smalltalk, and Prolog. Tim Budd <[email protected]> implemented them as subclasses in C++ sometime before 1991-09-12.
- kingston upon thames — a borough of Greater London, England.
- 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.
- lump in one's throat — the passage from the mouth to the stomach or to the lungs, including the pharynx, esophagus, larynx, and trachea.
- 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.
- mail transport agent — Message Transfer Agent
- make sheep's eyes at — to look shyly but amorously at
- matched-pairs design — (of an experiment) concerned with measuring the values of the dependent variables for pairs of subjects that have been matched to eliminate individual differences and that are respectively subjected to the control and the experimental condition
- 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).
- megakaryocytopoiesis — (biology) The cellular development process that leads to platelet production.
- military superiority — the power, strength, or numbers of armed forces of a country viewed as an advantage over another country
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- multistorey car park — a car park consisting of several levels
- 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.
- orthopaedic mattress — a specially firm mattress designed to help correct or ameliorate the discomfort of disorders of the spine and joints
- 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.
- pass the time of day — to exchange casual greetings (with an acquaintance)
- pentobarbital sodium — a barbiturate drug used in medicine as a sedative and hypnotic. Formula: C11H17N2O3Na
- personnel department — business: human resources
- personnel management — the branch of management dealing with staff recruitment and matters relating to employees
- peruvian mastic tree — a pepper tree, Schinus molle.
- 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.
- physical meteorology — the branch of meteorology dealing with the study of optical, electrical, acoustical, and thermodynamic phenomena in the atmosphere, including the physics of clouds and precipitation.
- poor man's something — a (cheaper) substitute for something
- potassium antimonate — a white, crystalline, slightly water-soluble powder, KSbO 3 , used chiefly as a pigment in paints.
- potassium bichromate — an orange-red, crystalline, water-soluble, poisonous powder, K 2 Cr 2 O 7 , used chiefly in dyeing, photography, and as a laboratory reagent.
- potassium binoxalate — a white, crystalline, hygroscopic, poisonous solid, KHC 2 O 4 , that is usually hydrated: used chiefly for removing ink stains, cleaning metal and wood, and in photography.
- potassium bitartrate — cream of tartar.
- potassium dichromate — an orange-red crystalline soluble solid substance that is a good oxidizing agent and is used in making chrome pigments and as a bleaching agent. Formula: K2Cr2O7
- potassium-bitartrate — a white, crystalline, water-soluble powder, C 4 H 5 KO 6 , used chiefly as an ingredient in baking powders and in galvanic tinning of metals. Also called potassium bitartrate, potassium acid tartrate. Compare tartar (def 3).
- premenstrual tension — Premenstrual tension is the same as premenstrual syndrome. The abbreviation PMT is often used.
- prescriptive grammar — an approach to grammar that is concerned with establishing norms of correct and incorrect usage and formulating rules based on these norms to be followed by users of the language.
- presentation manager — The elephantine graphical user interface to the OS/2 operating system.
- presidential primary — a direct primary for the selection of state delegates to a national party convention and the expression of preference for a U.S. presidential nominee.