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18-letter words containing m, o, t, h

  • jump through hoops — If someone makes you jump through hoops, they make you do lots of difficult or boring things in order to please them or achieve something.
  • king-of-the-salmon — a ribbonfish, Trachypterus altivelis, of northern parts of the Pacific Ocean.
  • lactogenic hormone — prolactin.
  • lagrange's theorem — the theorem that the order of each subgroup of a finite group is a factor of the order of the group.
  • lambeth conference — a convention of the bishops of the Anglican communion, held about every 10 years at Lambeth Palace to confer but not to define doctrine or to legislate on ecclesiastical matters.
  • list comprehension — (functional programming)   An expression in a functional language denoting the results of some operation on (selected) elements of one or more lists. An example in Haskell: This returns all pairs of numbers (x,y) where x and y are elements of the list 1, 2, ..., 10, y <= x and their sum is less than 10. A list comprehension is simply "syntactic sugar" for a combination of applications of the functions, concat, map and filter. For instance the above example could be written: The term "list comprehension" appears in the references below. The earliest reference to the notation is in Rod Burstall and John Darlington's description of their language, NPL. David Turner subsequently adopted this notation in his languages SASL, KRC and Miranda, where he has called them "ZF expressions", set abstractions and list abstractions (in his 1985 FPCA paper [Miranda: A Non-Strict Functional Language with Polymorphic Types]).
  • literae humaniores — (at Oxford University) the faculty concerned with Greek and Latin literature, ancient history, and philosophy; classics
  • logarithmic spiral — log r = aθ
  • logarithmus dualis — (mathematics)   (ld) Latin for logarithm base two. More commonly written as "log" with a subscript "2". Roughly the number of bits required to represent an integer.
  • loschmidt's number — the number of molecules in one cubic centimeter of an ideal gas at standard temperature and pressure, equal to 2.687 × 10 19.
  • lower klamath lake — See under Klamath Lakes.
  • magic switch story — Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no-one knows who). You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labelled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words "magic" and "more magic". The switch was in the "more magic" position. I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side. It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed. Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the "more magic" position before reviving the computer. A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the "more magic" position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch. The computer promptly crashed. This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since. We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic. I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on "more magic".
  • magnetorheological — (physics) describing a substance whose rheological properties are modified by a magnetic field.
  • make a meal of sth — If you think someone is taking more time and energy to do something than is necessary, you can say that they are making a meal of it.
  • make a night of it — to cause an activity to last a night
  • make short work of — exertion or effort directed to produce or accomplish something; labor; toil.
  • make sth one's own — If you make something your own, you become involved in it in such a way that people think of it as being related only to you or belonging only to you, rather than to anyone else.
  • maternity hospital — birthing facility
  • mathematical error — a mistake in a mathematical calculation, etc
  • mathematical logic — symbolic logic.
  • mathematical model — a representation of a system, process, etc, in mathematical terms
  • median lethal dose — the quantity of a lethal substance, as a poison or pathogen, or of ionizing radiation that will kill 50 percent of the organisms subjected to it in a specified time period. Symbol: LD 5 0.
  • melt in your mouth — to require little or no chewing
  • menthol cigarettes — cigarettes that are flavoured with menthol
  • merchant of venice — a comedy (1596?) by Shakespeare.
  • metamorphic facies — Geology. a group of metamorphic rock units characterized by particular mineralogic associations.
  • methylcyclohexanol — a colorless, aromatic, viscous liquid mixture, chiefly of the ortho and para forms of CH 3 C 6 H 1 0 OH, derived from cresol by hydrogenation: used chiefly as a solvent for rubber, cellulose, esters, and phenols.
  • methylene chloride — a colorless, volatile liquid, CH 2 Cl 2 , used chiefly as a solvent, as a refrigerant, and as a local anesthetic in dentistry.
  • methylprednisolone — A synthetic glucocorticoid drug, with chemical formula C22H30O5.
  • methyltestosterone — a synthetic androgenic steroid drug, C 2 0 H 3 0 O 2 , used for its anabolic properties in males in the treatment of hypogonadism and other androgen-deficiency disease states, and in females in the treatment of breast cancer.
  • meurthe-et-moselle — a department in NE France. 2038 sq. mi. (5280 sq. km). Capital: Nancy.
  • microsloth windows — (abuse, operating system)   /mi:'kroh-sloth" win"dohz/ (Or "Windoze", /win'dohz/) A derogatory term for Microsoft Windows which is so limited by bug-for-bug compatibility with mess-dos that it is agonisingly slow on anything less than a fast 486. Also called just "Windoze", with the implication that you can fall asleep waiting for it to do anything; the latter term is extremely common on Usenet. Compare X, sun-stools.
  • microsoft exchange — (messaging)   Microsoft's messaging and enterprise collaboration server. Exchange's primary role is as an electronic mail message store but it can also store calendars, task lists, contact details, and other data.
  • middle paleolithic — See under Paleolithic.
  • middle-of-the-road — favoring, following, or characterized by an intermediate position between two extremes, especially in politics; moderate.
  • minister of health — a person appointed to head the government department of health
  • moccasin telegraph — the transmission of rumour or secret information; the grapevine
  • modular arithmetic — arithmetic in which numbers that are congruent modulo a given number are treated as the same. Compare congruence (def 2), modulo, modulus (def 2b).
  • monophosphorylated — (biochemistry) phosphorylated with a single unit of phosphoric acid.
  • monophthongization — to change into or pronounce as a monophthong.
  • monte carlo method — a technique for numerically approximating the solution of a mathematical problem by studying the distribution of some random variable, often generated by a computer.
  • moog (synthesizer) — an early musical synthesizer
  • mop the floor with — that part of a room, hallway, or the like, that forms its lower enclosing surface and upon which one walks.
  • morphine addiction — the fact or condition of being addicted to morphine
  • moscow art theater — a Russian theatrical company founded in 1898 principally by Konstantin Stanislavski and famous for its naturalistic acting.
  • moulding technique — the technique used to shape a material into a frame or mould
  • mount saint helens — a city in Merseyside, in NW England, near Liverpool.
  • move the goalposts — to change the aims of an activity to ensure the desired results
  • multiple ownership — ownership by several people or organizations
  • muscular dystrophy — a hereditary disease characterized by gradual wasting of the muscles with replacement by scar tissue and fat, sometimes also affecting the heart.
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