22-letter words containing n, p, l
- horizontal application — An application program common to different business processes, e.g. office automation. Compare vertical application.
- horn-rimmed spectacles — spectacles with rims made of material resembling horn
- hospital administrator — a person who works in the management team of a hospital
- hybrid multiprocessing — (parallel) (HMP) The kind of multitasking which OS/2 supports. HMP provides some elements of symmetric multiprocessing, using add-on IBM software called MP/2. OS/2 SMP was planned for release in late 1993.
- in the lap of the gods — If you say that a situation is in the lap of the gods, you mean that its success or failure depends entirely on luck or on things that are outside your control.
- incremental repetition — repetition, with variation, of a refrain or other part of a poem, especially a ballad.
- initial program loader — (operating system) (IPL) A bootstrap loader which loads the part of an operating system needed to load the remainder of the operating system.
- intermetallic compound — a compound of two or more metals.
- interoperable database — A database front-end which communicates with multiple heterogenous databases and makes them appear as a single homogenous entity with semantic calls. See ODBC.
- japanese umbrella pine — a single aberrant species of pine, Sciadopitys verticillata, in which the leaves are fused in pairs and the crown is spire-shaped
- keep one's eyes peeled — to watch vigilantly (for)
- keep one's own counsel — advice; opinion or instruction given in directing the judgment or conduct of another.
- landscape architecture — the art of arranging or modifying the features of a landscape, an urban area, etc., for aesthetic or practical reasons.
- last call optimisation — (programming) (Or "tail call optimisation") Discarding the immediate calling context (call stack frame) when the last action of a function or procedure, A, is to call another function or procedure, B. B will then return directly to A's caller, or possibly further up the call stack if the optimisation has been applied to several consecutive calls. Last call optimisation allows arbitrarily deep nesting of procedure calls without consuming memory to store useless environments. This is particularly useful in the special case of tail recursion optimisation, where a procedure's last action is to call itself (possibly indirectly).
- le chatelier principle — the law that if a constraint is applied to a system in equilibrium, the system adjusts to a new equilibrium that tends to counteract the constraint.
- left-handed compliment — an ambiguous compliment
- lempel-ziv compression — Substitutional compression schemes proposed by Jakob Ziv and Abraham Lempel in 1977 and 1978. There are two main schemes, LZ77 and LZ78. Lempel-Ziv Welch compression is a variant of LZ78.
- lesser prairie chicken — either of two North American gallinaceous birds of western prairies, Tympanuchus cupido (greater prairie chicken) or T. pallidicinctus (lesser prairie chicken) having rufous, brown, black, and white plumage.
- lethargic encephalitis — sleeping sickness (def 2).
- little st bernard pass — a pass over the Savoy Alps, between Bourg-Saint-Maurice, France, and La Thuile, Italy: 11th-century hospice. Height: 2187 m (7177 ft)
- love-hate relationship — If you have a love-hate relationship with someone or something, your feelings towards them change suddenly and often from love to hate.
- lowest common multiple — the smallest number that is a common multiple of a given set of numbers.
- magnetic dipole moment — a measure of the magnetic strength of a magnet or current-carrying coil, expressed as the torque per unit magnetic-flux density produced when the magnet or coil is set with its axis perpendicular to the magnetic field
- magnetic pole strength — Electricity. a measure of the force exerted by one face of a magnet on a face of another magnet when both magnets are represented by equal and opposite poles. Symbol: m.
- make one's flesh creep — to move slowly with the body close to the ground, as a reptile or an insect, or a person on hands and knees.
- mcculloch-pitts neuron — (artificial intelligence) The basic building block of artificial neural networks. It receives one or more inputs and produces one or more identical outputs, each of which is a simple non-linear function of the sum of the inputs to the neuron. The non-linear function is typically a threshhold or step function which is usually smoothed (i.e. a sigmoid) to facilitate learning.
- mecklenburg-vorpommern — German name of Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania.
- miscellaneous expenses — small expenses of various kinds
- modified american plan — (in hotels) a system of paying a single fixed rate that covers room, breakfast, and one other meal, usually dinner. Abbreviation: MAP.
- mozilla public license — Open source license
- multiplicative inverse — reciprocal (def 9).
- myalgic encephalopathy — a condition characterized by painful muscles, extreme fatigue, and general debility, sometimes occurring as a sequel to viral illness
- nigger in the woodpile — a hidden snag or hindrance
- non-hodgkin's lymphoma — Pathology. any of several malignancies of the lymphatic system in which the cells characteristic of Hodgkin's disease are absent.
- non-maskable interrupt — (NMI) An IRQ 7 on the PDP-11 or 680x0 or the NMI line on an 80x86. In contrast with a priority interrupt (which might be ignored, although that is unlikely), an NMI is *never* ignored.
- nonrepresentationalism — not resembling or portraying any object in physical nature: a nonrepresentational painting.
- nonspecular reflection — the diffuse reflection of sound or light waves
- north rhine-westphalia — a state in W Germany; formerly a part of Rhine province. 13,154 sq. mi. (34,070 sq. km). Capital: Düsseldorf.
- object-oriented pascal — Object Pascal
- occupational therapist — professional who assists with rehabilitation
- operational data store — (database) (ODS) A group of integrated databases designed to support the monitoring of operations. Unlike function oriented databases, an ODS contains subject-oriented, dynamic, current enterprise-wide information that is continually updated to show the current state of operations.
- outline specifications — preliminary specifications or plans on which later plans are based
- paddle one's own canoe — any of various slender, open boats, tapering to a point at both ends, propelled by paddles or sometimes sails and traditionally formed of light framework covered with bark, skins, or canvas, or formed from a dug-out or burned-out log or logs, and now usually made of aluminum, fiberglass, etc.
- parallel server option — Oracle Parallel Server
- parliamentary election — an election to select the members of a national parliament
- partial-birth abortion — (term used chiefly by opponents of abortion) D & C.
- pavlovian conditioning — conditioning (def 2).
- personal rapid transit — a short system of small, self-propelled, automated, rubber-tired vehicles that usually run on elevated concrete tracks and allow a passenger a limited selection of routes, as in an amusement park or at an airport. Abbreviation: PRT.
- personal relationships — relationships between people, especially those between friends, lovers and family members
- phase alternating line — (television) (PAL) The video signal format used in the UK [where else?]. PAL uses Amplitude Modulation for the video information, and Frequency Modulation for the audio information. The phase of the colour subcarrier is reversed on alternate lines which (together with the use of a delay line) allows the receiver to cancel any phase errors introduced in the path between the studio and the end-user's receiver. Such phase errors are quite common and would cause the displayed colours to shift in hue. The US equivalent, NTSC, does not have this feature and thus requires a user control to correct for transmission phase errors, hence the mis-expansion "Never Twice the Same Colour".