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18-letter words containing m, y, s, o, r

  • lay down your arms — If soldiers lay down their arms, they stop fighting and give up their weapons.
  • locked-in syndrome — a condition in which a person is conscious but unable to move any part of the body except the eyes: results from damage to the brainstem
  • loosestrife family — the plant family Lythraceae, characterized by herbaceous plants, shrubs, and trees having usually opposite or whorled, simple leaves, clusters of flowers, and fruit in the form of a capsule, and including the crape myrtle, loosestrifes of the genus Lythrum, and the henna shrub.
  • 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".
  • magnetocrystalline — (physics) Describing the interaction between the magnetization and the crystal structure of a material.
  • maternity hospital — birthing facility
  • meniere's syndrome — a disease of the labyrinth of the ear, characterized by deafness, ringing in the ears, dizziness, and nausea.
  • metabolic syndrome — Pathology. a group of medical conditions present simultaneously in a patient, as high blood pressure, low HDL cholesterol levels, and an excess of abdominal fat, that increases a person's risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Also called insulin resistance syndrome.
  • 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.
  • microcrystallinity — The condition of being microcrystalline.
  • minority president — (in the US) a president who has been elected by the largest number of votes cast but not by a majority of the electorate
  • monophosphorylated — (biochemistry) phosphorylated with a single unit of phosphoric acid.
  • moog (synthesizer) — an early musical synthesizer
  • mucopolysaccharide — (formerly) glycosaminoglycan.
  • muscular dystrophy — a hereditary disease characterized by gradual wasting of the muscles with replacement by scar tissue and fat, sometimes also affecting the heart.
  • music to your ears — If something that you hear is music to your ears, it makes you feel very happy.
  • neo-pythagoreanism — a philosophical system, established in Alexandria and Rome in the second century b.c., consisting mainly of revived Pythagorean doctrines with elements of Platonism and Stoicism.
  • neuropsychodynamic — Of or pertaining to neuropsychodynamics.
  • neutrino astronomy — the branch of astronomy dealing with the detection and measurement of neutrinos emitted by the sun and other celestial objects.
  • new storage system — (storage)   (NSS) A major Multics implementation project during the 1970s. The initial Multics file system design had evolved from the one-huge-disk world of CTSS. When multiple disk units were used they were just assigned increasing ranges of disk addresses, so a segment could have pages scattered over all disks on the system. This provided good I/O parallelism but made crash recovery expensive. NSS redesigned the lower levels of the file system, introducing the concepts of logical volume and physical volume and a mapping from a Multics directory branch to a VTOC entry for each file. The new system had much better recovery performance in exchange for a small space and performance cost.
  • normally aspirated — A normally aspirated or naturally aspirated engine breathes air at atmospheric pressure.
  • ovariohysterectomy — Surgical removal of the ovaries and uterus.
  • people's democracy — (in Communist ideology) a country or form of government in transition from bourgeois democracy to socialism. In this stage there is more than one class, the largest being the proletariat, led by the Communist Party, which is therefore the dominant power
  • phantasmagorically — having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination.
  • polystyrene cement — a purpose-made adhesive for fixing rigid polystyrene
  • postviral syndrome — debilitating condition occurring as a sequel to viral illness
  • potassium myronate — sinigrin.
  • prayer of manasses — a book of the Apocrypha.
  • processionary moth — a moth of the family Thaumetopoeidae, esp the oak processionary moth (Thaumetopoea processionea), the larvae of which leave the communal shelter nightly for food in a V-shaped procession
  • programme of study — the prescribed syllabus that pupils must be taught at each key stage in the National Curriculum
  • psychogalvanometer — a type of galvanometer for detecting and measuring psychogalvanic currents.
  • psychopharmacology — the branch of pharmacology dealing with the psychological effects of drugs.
  • pulmonary embolism — the blockage of a pulmonary artery, often by a blood clot, that stops the flow of blood to the lungs and which can result in death if untreated
  • raman spectroscopy — a form of spectroscopy which uses the Raman effect for studying molecules
  • registered company — a company which has officially registered its business
  • respiratory system — the system by which oxygen is taken into the body and an exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide takes place; in mammals the system includes the nasal passages, pharynx, trachea, bronchi, and lungs.
  • restoration comedy — English comedy of the period of the Restoration, stressing manners and social satire.
  • restriction enzyme — any of a group of enzymes that catalyze the cleavage of DNA molecules at specific sites: used for gene splicing in recombinant DNA technology and for chromosome mapping.
  • rheims-douay bible — Douay Bible.
  • secondary consumer — (in the food chain) a carnivore that feeds only upon herbivores.
  • secondary emission — the emission of electrons (secondary electrons) from a material that is bombarded with electrons or ions.
  • semi-microanalysis — any analytical method in which the weight of the sample is between 10 and 100 milligrams.
  • september holidays — a period of time in September when people do not have to go to school, college or work
  • sling psychrometer — a psychrometer so designed that the wet-bulb thermometer can be ventilated, to expedite evaporation, by whirling in the air.
  • slow-motion replay — a showing again in slow motion of a sequence of action, esp of part of a sporting contest immediately after it happens
  • spectrocolorimetry — the quantitative measure of colors by spectrophotometry.
  • spherical geometry — the branch of geometry that deals with figures on spherical surfaces.
  • st john chrysostom — Saint John, a.d. 347?–407, ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople.
  • state of emergency — If a government or other authority declares a state of emergency in an area, it introduces special measures such as increased powers for the police or army, usually because of civil disorder or because of a natural disaster such as an earthquake.
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