0%

20-letter words containing n, a, p

  • lump in one's throat — the passage from the mouth to the stomach or to the lungs, including the pharynx, esophagus, larynx, and trachea.
  • lunisolar precession — the principal component of the precession of the equinoxes, produced by the gravitational attraction of the sun and the moon on the equatorial bulge of the earth.
  • lymphogranulomatosis — widespread infectious granuloma of the lymphatic system.
  • magneto-optical disk — (hardware, storage)   (MO) A plastic or glass disk coated with a compound (often TbFeCo) with special optical, magnetic and thermal properties. The disk is read by bouncing a low-intensity laser off the disk. Originally the laser was infrared, but frequencies up to blue may be possible giving higher storage density. The polarisation of the reflected light depends on the polarity of the stored magnetic field. To write, a higher intensity laser heats the coating up to its Curie point, allowing its magnetisation to be altered in a way that is retained when it has cooled. Although optical, they appear as hard drives to the operating system and do not require a special filesystem (they can be formatted as FAT, HPFS, NTFS, etc.). The initial 5.25" MO drives, introduced at the end of the 1980s, were the size of a full-height 5.25" hard drive (like in IBM PC XT) and the disks looked like a CD-ROM enclosed in an old-style cartridge In 2006, a 3.5" drive has the size of 1.44 megabyte diskette drive with disks about the size of a regular 1.44MB floppy disc but twice the thickness.
  • magnetoencephalogram — a record of the magnetic field of the brain. Abbreviation: MEG.
  • mail transport agent — Message Transfer Agent
  • malpighian corpuscle — Also called kidney corpuscle, Malpighian body. the structure at the beginning of a vertebrate nephron, consisting of a glomerulus and its surrounding Bowman's capsule.
  • marginal probability — (in a multivariate distribution) the probability of one variable taking a specific value irrespective of the values of the others
  • marketing department — the department of a commercial organization that deals with the marketing of products
  • matched-pairs design — (of an experiment) concerned with measuring the values of the dependent variables for pairs of subjects that have been matched to eliminate individual differences and that are respectively subjected to the control and the experimental condition
  • material implication — equivalence (def 4a).
  • maternal deprivation — the lack of a mother in a child's life, considered a cause of psychological problems later in life
  • mechanical impedance — impedance (def 2).
  • mechanical-impedance — Electricity. the total opposition to alternating current by an electric circuit, equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the resistance and reactance of the circuit and usually expressed in ohms. Symbol: Z.
  • medical practitioner — doctor
  • megabytes per second — (unit)   (MBps, MB/s) Millions of bytes per second. A unit of data rate. 1 MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes per second (not 1,048,576).
  • member of parliament — A Member of Parliament is a person who has been elected by the people in a particular area to represent them in a country's parliament. The abbreviation MP is often used.
  • mexican jumping bean — jumping bean.
  • minkowski space-time — a four-dimensional space in which three coordinates specify the position of a point in space and the fourth represents the time at which an event occurred at that point
  • missionary apostolic — an honorary title conferred by the pope on certain missionaries.
  • mopping-up operation — an operation after a battle or campaign to root out remaining enemy forces or installations
  • multipart stationery — continuous stationery comprising two or more sheets, either carbonless or with carbon paper between the sheets
  • multiple inheritance — (programming)   In object-oriented programming, the possibility that a class may have more than one direct superclass in the class hierarchy. The opposite is single inheritance.
  • multiple personality — a rare disorder in which an individual displays several functionally dissociated personalities, each of a complexity comparable to that of a normal individual.
  • multiplication table — Arithmetic. a tabular listing of the products of any two numbers of a set, usually of the integers 1 through 10 or 1 through 12.
  • multistep hydroplane — a motorship having a flat bottom built as a series of planes inclined forward, the ship planing on each from stem to stern as its speed increases.
  • neapolitan ice cream — variously flavored and colored ice cream and ice mixtures frozen in layers.
  • negative campaigning — political campaigning in which a politician or party focuses on criticizing another politician or party rather than emphasizing their own positive qualities
  • neon lamp (or tube) — a discharge lamp containing neon, that ionizes and glows with a red light (neon light) when an electric current is sent through it: used esp. in advertising signs
  • nephroangiosclerosis — (pathology) sclerosis of the renal arterioles.
  • net national product — the gross national product less allowance for depreciation of capital goods. Abbreviation: NNP.
  • network transparency — (networking)   A feature of an operating system or other service which lets the user access a remote resource through a network without having to know if the resource is remote or local. For example NFS allow users to access remote files as if they were local files.
  • neurophysiologically — In terms of, or with regard to, neurophysiology.
  • neuropsychiatrically — In terms of neuropsychiatry.
  • neuropsychologically — In terms of or by means of neuropsychology.
  • new democratic party — the Canadian social democratic party formed in 1961
  • next program counter — (architecture)   (nPC) A register in a CPU that contains the address of the instruction to be executed next.
  • niemann-pick disease — a rare, hereditary lipid-storage disease, occurring primarily among Ashkenazic Jews, in which abnormal lipid metabolism results in enlargement of the liver, spleen, and lymph nodes, and in progressive mental and physical deterioration.
  • nine plus zero array — the arrangement of microtubules characteristic of basal bodies and centrioles, consisting of nine evenly spaced triplets between the outer and inner walls of the structure and having no central microtubules. Symbol: 9 + 0.
  • non-optimal solution — (Or "sub-optimal solution") An astoundingly stupid way to do something. This term is generally used in deadpan sarcasm, as its impact is greatest when the person speaking looks completely serious. See also Bad Thing.
  • nondirective therapy — client-centered therapy.
  • nonrepeating decimal — a decimal representation of any irrational number, having the property that no sequence of digits is repeated ad infinitum.
  • north american plate — a major tectonic division of the earth's crust, comprising Greenland and the continent of North America and the suboceanic Labrador and North American Basins, and bounded on the east by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, on the south by the Caribbean and South American Plates, and on the west by the San Andreas fault and Aleutian Trench.
  • north celestial pole — the point of intersection of the earth's extended axis and the northern half of the celestial sphere, lying about 1° from Polaris
  • north temperate zone — the part of the earth's surface between the tropic of Cancer and the Arctic Circle.
  • not put a foot wrong — If you never put a foot wrong, you never make any mistakes.
  • occupation franchise — the right of a tenant to vote in national and local elections
  • occupation groupings — a system of classifying people according to occupation, based originally on information obtained by government census and subsequently developed by market research. The classifications are used by the advertising industry to identify potential markets. The groups are A, B, C1, C2, D, and E
  • occupational disease — Also called industrial disease. a disease caused by the conditions or hazards of a particular occupation.
  • occupational pension — a pension scheme provided for the members of a particular occupation or by a specific employer or group of employers
Was this page helpful?
Yes No
Thank you for your feedback! Tell your friends about this page
Tell us why?