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16-letter words containing m, o, g, a, i

  • digital computer — a computer that processes information in digital form.
  • dinosaurs mating — (humour)   The activity said to occur when yet another big iron merger or buy-out occurs; reflects a perception by hackers that these signal another stage in the long, slow dying of the mainframe industry. Also described as "elephants mating": lots of noise and action at a high level, with an eventual outcome in the somewhat distant future. In its glory days of the 1960s, it was "IBM and the Seven Dwarves": Burroughs, Control Data, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and Univac. Early on, RCA sold out to Univac and GE also sold out, and it was "IBM and the BUNCH" (an acronym for Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell) for a while. Honeywell was bought out by Bull. Univac in turn merged with Sperry to form Sperry/Univac, which was later merged (although the employees of Sperry called it a hostile takeover) with Burroughs to form Unisys in 1986 (this was when the phrase "dinosaurs mating" was coined). In 1991 AT&T absorbed NCR, only to spit it out again in 1996. Unisys bought Convergent Technologies in 1988 and later others. More such earth-shaking unions of doomed giants seem inevitable.
  • discombobulating — Present participle of discombobulate.
  • document imaging — the process of converting paper documents into an electronic or digital format
  • economic embargo — a legal stoppage of commerce, usually taken by one nation or group of nations to harm the economy of another nation or group, often to force a political change
  • economic migrant — person: seeks work abroad
  • el camino bignum — (humour)   /el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ The road mundanely called El Camino Real, a road through the San Francisco peninsula that originally extended all the way down to Mexico City and many portions of which are still intact. Navigation on the San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which defines logical north and south even though it isn't really north-south many places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University. The Spanish word "real" (which has two syllables: /ray-al'/) means "royal"; El Camino Real is "the royal road". In the Fortran language, a "real" quantity is a number typically precise to seven significant digits, and a "double precision" quantity is a larger floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (other languages have similar "real" types). When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on "real", he started calling it "El Camino Double Precision" - but when the hacker was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it "El Camino Bignum", and that name has stuck. (See bignum).
  • electromagnetics — Electricity and magnetism, collectively, as a field of study.
  • electromagnetism — The interaction of electric currents or fields and magnetic fields.
  • electromigration — (physics) the transport of small particles under the influence of an electric charge.
  • elimination game — In sports, an elimination game is a game that decides which team or player will take part in the next stage of a particular competition.
  • fair to middling — free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice: a fair decision; a fair judge.
  • farmington hills — a city in SE Michigan.
  • fashion magazine — periodical about trendy clothing
  • flight formation — an arrangement of two or more airplanes flying together in a group, usually in a predetermined pattern.
  • flight simulator — a device used in pilot and crew training that provides a cockpit environment and sensations of flight under actual conditions.
  • formation flying — a formal arrangement of flying aircraft acting as a unit
  • four-masted brig — jackass bark (def 2).
  • gamma correction — (hardware)   Adjustments applied during the display of a digital representation of colour on a screen in order to compensate for the fact that the Cathode Ray Tubes used in computer monitors (and televisions) produce a light intensity which is not proportional to the input voltage. The light intensity is actually proportional to the input voltage raised to the inverse power of some constant, called gamma. Its value varies from one display to another, but is usually around 2.5. Because it is more intuitive for the colour components (red, green and blue) to be varied linearly in the computer, the actual voltages sent to the monitor by the display hardware must be adjusted in order to make the colour component intensity on the screen proportional to the value stored in the computer's display memory. This process is most easily achieved by a dedicated module in the display hardware which simply scales the outputs of the display memory before sending them to the digital-to-analogue converters. More expensive graphics cards and workstations (particularly those used for CAD applications) will have a gamma correction facility. In combination with the "white-point" gamma correction is used to achieve precise colour matching.
  • garlic mushrooms — mushrooms, often pan-fried, cooked with garlic
  • gender-normative — cisgender.
  • geometrical pace — a pace of 5 feet (1.5 meters), representing the distance between the places at which the same foot rests on the ground in walking.
  • geomorphological — Of or pertaining to geomorphology.
  • global community — the people or nations of the world, considered as being closely connected by modern telecommunications and as being economically, socially, and politically interdependent
  • glycosylceramide — (organic chemistry) Any glycosyl derivative of a ceramide.
  • go out on a limb — say sth daring
  • goosefoot family — formerly, the plant family Chenopodiaceae, characterized by often weedy herbaceous plants and shrubs having simple, usually alternate leaves, small and inconspicuous flowers, and tiny, dry fruit, and including the beet, glasswort, goosefoot, Russian thistle, saltbush, and spinach; now part of the amaranth family, Amaranthaceae.
  • governmentalized — Simple past tense and past participle of governmentalize.
  • gram atomic mass — the quantity of an element whose weight in grams is numerically equal to the atomic weight of the element.
  • gravity platform — (in the oil industry) a drilling platform that rests directly on the sea bed and is kept in position by its own weight; it is usually made of reinforced concrete
  • gynandromorphism — an individual exhibiting morphological characteristics of both sexes.
  • hard rock mining — (loosely) of or relating to igneous or metamorphic rocks, as in mining (hard-rock mining) and geology (hard-rock geology)
  • have a big mouth — to speak indiscreetly, loudly, or excessively
  • have a good time — enjoy yourself, have fun
  • hemagglutination — the clumping of red blood cells.
  • hemangioblastoma — (medicine) Any of several benign neoplasm tumours of the brain.
  • high memory area — (storage)   (HMA) The first 64 kilobytes (minus 16 byte) of the extended memory on an IBM PC. By a strange design glitch the Intel 80x86 processors can actually address 17*64 kbyte minus 16 byte of memory (from 0000:0000 to ffff:ffff) in real mode. In the Intel 8086 and Intel 8088 processors, unable to handle more than 1 megabyte of memory, addressing wrapped around, that is, address ffff:0010 was equivalent to 0000:0000. For compatibility reasons, later processors still wrapped around by default, but this feature could be switched off. Special programs called A20 handlers can control the addressing mode dynamically, thereby allowing programs to load themselves into the 1024--1088 kbyte region and run in real mode. From version 5.0 parts of MS-DOS can be loaded into HMA as well freeing up to 46 kbytes of conventional memory.
  • high-performance — A high-performance car or other product goes very fast or does a lot.
  • home heating oil — fuel oil for domestic central heating
  • homeric laughter — loud, hearty laughter, as of the gods.
  • huffman encoding — Huffman coding
  • hyperandrogenism — (medicine) An abnormally high production of androgens.
  • hypnagogic image — an image experienced by a person just before falling asleep, which often resembles a hallucination
  • image consultant — imagemaker.
  • image processing — (graphics)   Computer manipulation of images. Some of the many algorithms used in image processing include convolution (on which many others are based), FFT, DCT, thinning (or skeletonisation), edge detection and contrast enhancement. These are usually implemented in software but may also use special purpose hardware for speed. Image processing contrasts with computer graphics, which is usually more concerned with the generation of artificial images, and visualisation, which attempts to understand (real-world) data by displaying it as an artificial image (e.g. a graph). Image processing is used in image recognition and computer vision. See also Pilot European Image Processing Archive.
  • imago europe plc — A UK Internet provider. There sevice is called Imago On-line. E-mail: <[email protected]>.
  • immigration laws — regulations on incoming foreigners
  • immoral earnings — money earned from work that transgresses accepted moral or legal rules
  • immunohematology — the study of blood and blood-forming tissue in relation to the immune response.
  • immunoregulation — (immunology) The control of immune responses between lymphocytes and macrophages.
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