20-letter words containing m, l, i, s
- commonwealth hackish — (jargon) Hacker jargon as spoken outside the US, especially in the British Commonwealth. It is reported that Commonwealth speakers are more likely to pronounce truncations like "char" and "soc", etc., as spelled (/char/, /sok/), as opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in newsgroup names (especially two-component names) tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot wib'l/ rather than /sohsh wib'l/). The prefix meta may be pronounced /mee't*/; similarly, Greek letter beta is usually /bee't*/, zeta is usually /zee't*/, and so forth. Preferred metasyntactic variables include blurgle, "eek", "ook", "frodo", and "bilbo"; "wibble", "wobble", and in emergencies "wubble"; "banana", "tom", "dick", "harry", "wombat", "frog", fish, and so on and on (see foo). Alternatives to verb doubling include suffixes "-o-rama", "frenzy" (as in feeding frenzy), and "city" (examples: "barf city!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump frenzy!"). Finally, note that the American terms "parens", "brackets", and "braces" for (), [], and {} are uncommon; Commonwealth hackish prefers "brackets", "square brackets", and "curly brackets". Also, the use of "pling" for bang is common outside the United States. See also attoparsec, calculator, chemist, console jockey, fish, go-faster stripes, grunge, hakspek, heavy metal, leaky heap, lord high fixer, loose bytes, muddie, nadger, noddy, psychedelicware, plingnet, raster blaster, RTBM, seggie, spod, sun lounge, terminal junkie, tick-list features, weeble, weasel, YABA, and notes or definitions under Bad Thing, barf, bum, chase pointers, cosmic rays, crippleware, crunch, dodgy, gonk, hamster, hardwarily, mess-dos, nibble, proglet, root, SEX, tweak and xyzzy.
- commune with oneself — to think; ponder
- communication skills — the ability to convey information and ideas effectively
- compartmentalisation — Alternative form of compartmentalization.
- compensating balance — Also, compensated balance, compensation balance. a balance wheel in a timepiece, designed to compensate for variations in tension in the hair spring caused by changes in temperature.
- compensation culture — a culture in which people are very ready to go to law over even relatively minor incidents in the hope of gaining compensation
- complaints procedure — a prescribed method of lodging a complaint to an institution
- comprehensive school — a secondary school for children of all abilities from the same district
- conditioned stimulus — a stimulus to which an organism has learned to make a response by classical conditioning
- constituent assembly — A constituent assembly is a body of representatives that is elected to create or change their country's constitution.
- consumer electronics — computers and other electronic devices designed for private individuals as opposed to businesses
- council of ministers — the EU's most important decision-making body
- criminal proceedings — action taken in a court to bring a criminal prosecution against someone
- criminal syndicalism — the doctrine of recourse to acts of violence or terrorism, or the advocacy of such acts, as a means of effecting economic or political change: proscribed by statute in many U.S. states.
- darkfield microscope — kind of microscope
- daylight saving time — Daylight Saving Time is a period of time in the summer when the clocks are set one hour forward, so that people can have extra light in the evening.
- daylight-saving time — the civil time observed when daylight saving is adopted in a country or community.
- dementia pugilistica — chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
- democratic socialism — socialism, or a modified form of socialism, achieved by a gradual transition by and under democratic political processes.
- dewey decimal system — a frequently used system of library book classification and arrangement with ten main subject classes
- dimensional analysis — a method for comparing the dimensions of the physical quantities occurring in a problem to find relationships between the quantities without having to solve the problem completely. Compare dimension (def 6).
- diplomatic secretary — secretary (def 5).
- diplomatic-secretary — secretary (def 5).
- displacement current — the rate of change, at any point in space, of electric displacement with time.
- displacement tonnage — the number of long tons of water displaced by a vessel, light or load displacement being specified.
- district of columbia — a federal area in the E United States, on the Potomac, coextensive with the federal capital, Washington. 69 sq. mi. (179 sq. km). Abbreviation: DC (for use with zip code), D.C.
- domestic heating oil — a liquid petroleum product used to fuel residential building furnaces or boilers
- double decomposition — a reaction whose result is the interchange of two parts of two substances to form two new substances, as AgNO 3 + NaCl → AgCl + NaNO 3 .
- drug delivery system — A drug delivery system is a system that is used as a medium or carrier for administering a pharmaceutical product to a patient.
- early modern english — the English language represented in printed documents of the period starting with Caxton (1476) and ending with Dryden (1700).
- early sunday morning — a painting (1930) by Edward Hopper.
- early warning system — Military. a network of radar installations designed to detect enemy aircraft or missiles in time for the effective deployment of defense systems.
- early-warning system — Military. a network of radar installations designed to detect enemy aircraft or missiles in time for the effective deployment of defense systems.
- economic rationalism — an economic policy based on the efficiency of market forces, characterized by minimal government intervention, tax cuts, privatization, and deregulation of labour markets
- eight queens problem — eight queens puzzle
- electrohydrodynamics — (physics) the study of the dynamics of electrically conducting fluid.
- electromotive series — a series of the metals, together with hydrogen, ranged in the order of their electrode potentials
- eleusinian mysteries — a mystical religious festival, held in September at Eleusis in classical times, in which initiates celebrated Persephone, Demeter, and Dionysus
- employee association — an organization, other than a trade union, whose members comprise employees of a single employing organization. The aims of the association may be social, recreational, or professional
- employer's liability — an employer's legal responsibility to pay damages to an employee who has been injured or who has contracted an illness because of the work he or she does
- endorsement in blank — an endorsement on a bill of exchange, cheque, etc, naming no payee and thus making the endorsed sum payable to the bearer
- equilibrium constant — The equilibrium constant is the ratio between the amount of reactants and the amount of product for a particular chemical reaction, used to calculate chemical behavior.
- essential amino acid — an amino acid that cannot be synthesized in the body and is thus an essential component of the diet
- essential complexity — (programming) A measure of the "structuredness" of a program.
- estrela mountain dog — a sturdy well-built dog of a Portuguese breed with a long thick coat and a thick tuft of hair round the neck, often used as a guard dog
- evening primrose oil — an oil, obtained from the seeds of the evening primrose, that is claimed to stimulate the production of prostaglandins
- explicit parallelism — A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which allows or forces the programmer to annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks. This is obviously more work for the programmer than a system with implicit parallelism (where the system decides automatically which parts to run in parallel) but may allow higher performance.
- field ion microscope — a device in which the atomic structure of the surface of a conductor is made visible by introducing helium gas into the device and applying a high voltage to ionize and accelerate the gas toward a fluorescent screen.
- field-ion microscope — a device in which the atomic structure of the surface of a conductor is made visible by introducing helium gas into the device and applying a high voltage to ionize and accelerate the gas toward a fluorescent screen.
- fill someone's shoes — an external covering for the human foot, usually of leather and consisting of a more or less stiff or heavy sole and a lighter upper part ending a short distance above, at, or below the ankle.