20-letter words containing n, a, i, l
- hexafluoroantimonate — (inorganic chemistry) The anion SbF6- or any salt containing this anion; it is used as an acidic catalyst in epoxide opening reactions.
- hierarchical routing — The complex problem of routing on large networks can be simplified by breaking a network into a hierarchy of smaller networks, where each level is responsible for its own routing. The Internet has, basically, three levels: the backbones, the mid-levels, and the stub networks. The backbones know how to route between the mid-levels, the mid-levels know how to route between the sites, and each site (being an autonomous system) knows how to route internally. See also Exterior Gateway Protocol, Interior Gateway Protocol, transit network.
- high-energy particle — Physics
- hildegard von bingen — Hildegard von (Hildegard of Bingen"Sibyl of the Rhine") 1098–1178, German nun, healer, writer, and composer.
- himalayan guinea pig — a variety of short-haired guinea pig with markings on its nose, ears, and feet
- hindu-arabic numeral — Arabic numeral.
- hold one's head high — to conduct oneself in a proud and confident manner
- holy water sprinkler — morning star (def 2).
- horizontal microcode — (processor) Microcode using horizontal encoding.
- horizontal scan rate — (hardware) (HSR) The measure of how many scan lines of pixels a monitor can display in one second, expressed in kHz (generally somewhere between 20 and 100 kHz). The HSR is controlled by the horizontal sync signal generated by the video controller, but is limited by the speed with which the monitor can scan the electron beam horizontally across the screen and then return it to the beginning of the next line.
- horizontally opposed — A horizontally opposed engine has the cylinders set horizontally at either side of the crankshaft.
- hospitality industry — the hotel and accommodation industry
- household appliances — devices or machines, usually electrical, that are in your home and which you use to do jobs such as cleaning or cooking
- 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.
- human papillomavirus — any of a group of papillomaviruses causing cutaneous warts and lesions of the oral, anal, and genital mucous membranes in human beings
- hydraulic fracturing — a process in which fractures in rocks below the earth's surface are opened and widened by injecting chemicals and liquids at high pressure: used especially to extract natural gas or oil.
- hydraulic suspension — a system of motor-vehicle suspension using hydraulic members, often with hydraulic compensation between front and rear systems (hydroelastic suspension)
- hydrodesulfurization — desulfurization by catalytic agents of the sulfur-rich hydrocarbons obtained from petroleum or the like during cracking or hydrocracking.
- hyperbolic cotangent — a hyperbolic function that is the ratio of cosh to sinh, being the reciprocal of tanh; coth
- hyperlipoproteinemia — Pathology. any of various disorders of lipoprotein metabolism, usually characterized by abnormally high levels of cholesterol and certain lipoproteins in the blood.
- ideal of pure reason — God, seen as an idea of pure reason unifying the personal soul with the cosmos.
- ignatius (of) loyola — Saint(born Iñigo López de Recalde) (1491-1556); Sp. priest: founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuit order): his day is July 31
- in (or out of) play — in (or not in) the condition for continuing play
- in a class by itself — unique
- in flagrante delicto — Law. in the very act of committing the offense.
- in the lap of luxury — If you say that someone lives in the lap of luxury, you mean that they live in conditions of great comfort and wealth.
- in the last analysis — after everything has been given due consideration
- in the public domain — able to be discussed and examined freely by the general public
- incomplete dominance — the appearance in a heterozygote of a trait that is intermediate between either of the trait's homozygous phenotypes.
- incremental analysis — (testing) Partial analysis of an incomplete product to allow early feedback on its development.
- incremental recorder — a device for recording data as it is generated, usually on paper tape or magnetic tape, and feeding it into a computer
- independent variable — Mathematics. a variable in a functional relation whose value determines the value or values of other variables, as x in the relation y = 3 x 2 . Compare dependent variable (def 1).
- indistinguishability — The state of being indistinguishable.
- industrial democracy — control of an organization by the people who work for it, esp by workers holding positions on its board of directors
- industrial espionage — the stealing of technological or commercial research data, blueprints, plans, etc., as by a person in the hire of a competing company.
- industrial insurance — industrial life insurance.
- industrial relations — (used with a plural verb) the dealings or relations of an industrial concern with its employees, with labor in general, with the public, etc.
- industrial sociology — the sociological study of social relationships and social structures in business settings.
- inelastic scattering — a scattering of particles due to an inelastic collision that also changes their wavelengths and phases.
- inertial upper stage — a U.S. two-stage, solid-propellant rocket used to boost a relatively heavy spacecraft from a low earth orbit into a planetary trajectory or an elliptical transfer orbit. Abbreviation: IUS.
- infiltration gallery — a conduit, built in permeable earth, for collecting ground water.
- information builders — Distributors of LEVEL5 OBJECT. Telephone +1 800 969 INFO.
- information overload — an excess of incoming information, as might confront a pedestrian on a crowded city street, that forces one to be selective in the information received and retained.
- initial program load — (operating system) (IPL) The procedure used to (re-)start a computer system by copying the operating system kernel into main memory and running it. Part of the boot sequence.
- inland revenue stamp — a certificate issued by the Inland Revenue to acknowledge payment of tax
- institutionalisation — The process of embedding something within an organization or society as an established custom or norm.
- institutionalization — to make institutional.
- insulin-coma therapy — a former treatment for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, employing insulin-induced hypoglycemia as a method for producing convulsive seizures.
- intelligent database — (database) A database management system which performs data validation and processing traditionally done by application programs. Most DBMSs provide some data validation, e.g. rejecting invalid dates or alphabetic data entered into money fields, but often most processing is done by application programs. There is however no limit to the amount of processing that can be done by an intelligent database as long as the process is a standard function for that data. Examples of techniques used to implement intelligent databases are constraints, triggers and stored procedures. Moving processing to the database aids data integrity because it is guaranteed to be consistent across all uses of the data. Mainframe databases have increasingly become more intelligent and personal computer database systems are rapidly following.
- intelligent terminal — (hardware) (or "smart terminal", "programmable terminal") A terminal that often contains not only a keyboard and screen, but also comes with a disk drive and printer, so it can perform limited processing tasks when not communicating directly with the central computer. Some can be programmed by the user to perform many basic tasks, including both arithmetic and logic operations. In some cases, when the user enters data, the data will be checked for errors and some type of report will be produced. In addition, the valid data that is entered may be stored on the disk, it will be transmitted over communication lines to the central computer. An intelligent terminal may have enough computing capability to draw graphics or to offload some kind of front-end processing from the computer it talks to. The development of workstations and personal computers has made this term and the product it describes semi-obsolescent, but one may still hear variants of the phrase "act like a smart terminal" used to describe the behaviour of workstations or PCs with respect to programs that execute almost entirely out of a remote server's storage, using said devices as displays. The term once meant any terminal with an addressable cursor; the opposite of a glass tty. Today, a terminal with merely an addressable cursor, but with none of the more-powerful features mentioned above, is called a dumb terminal. There is a classic quote from Rob Pike (inventor of the blit terminal): "A smart terminal is not a smart*ass* terminal, but rather a terminal you can educate". This illustrates a common design problem: The attempt to make peripherals (or anything else) intelligent sometimes results in finicky, rigid "special features" that become just so much dead weight if you try to use the device in any way the designer didn't anticipate. Flexibility and programmability, on the other hand, are *really* smart. Compare hook.