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20-letter words containing o, d, r

  • languedoc-roussillon — a region of S France, on the Gulf of Lions: consists of the departments of Lozère, Gard, Hérault, Aude, and Pyrénées-Orientales; mainly mountainous with a coastal plain
  • law of contradiction — the law that a proposition cannot be both true and false or that a thing cannot both have and not have a given property.
  • law-and-order issues — issues concerning law and social conventions
  • least-squares method — a method of estimating values from a set of observations by minimizing the sum of the squares of the differences between the observations and the values to be found.
  • lieutenant commander — a commissioned officer ranking next below a commander and next above a lieutenant.
  • linearly ordered set — a set in which a relation, as “less than or equal to,” holds for all pairs of elements of the set.
  • little ringed plover — a small grey and brown coloured plover which breeds in Europe and Asia and migrates to Africa for winter
  • longitudinal framing — a system for framing steel vessels in which light, closely spaced, longitudinal frames are connected by heavy, widely spaced transverse frames with deep webs.
  • look homeward, angel — a novel (1929) by Thomas Wolfe.
  • lord high chancellor — the highest judicial officer of the British crown: law adviser of the ministry, keeper of the great seal, presiding officer in the House of Lords, etc.
  • lou gehrig's disease — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
  • loyal order of moose — See under moose (def 2).
  • macular degeneration — degeneration of the central portion of the retina, resulting in a loss of sharp vision.
  • magnetohydrodynamics — the branch of physics that deals with the motion of electrically conductive fluids, especially plasmas, in magnetic fields. Abbreviation: MHD.
  • mail exchange record — (messaging)   (MX Record) A DNS resource record type that says which SMTP server handles electronic mail for a particular domain. E.g. the MX record foo.co.uk. 1054 IN MX 10 mail.foo.co.uk. means that mail for an address like "[email protected]" should be sent to "mail.foo.co.uk". There can be several servers for a domain. The "10" is a priority - the server with the lowest number will be tried first.
  • mail-order catalogue — a catalogue of goods you can buy from a particular company by mail order
  • make a/no difference — If something makes a difference or makes a lot of difference, it affects you and helps you in what you are doing. If something makes no difference, it does not have any effect on what you are doing.
  • make head (n)or tail — If you say that you cannot make head nor tail of something or you cannot make head or tail of it, you are emphasizing that you cannot understand it at all.
  • make head or tail of — to attempt to understand (a problem, etc)
  • margaret of scotland — Saint. 1045–93, queen consort of Malcolm III of Scotland. Her piety and benefactions to the church led to her canonization (1250). Feast days: June 10, Nov 16
  • maternal deprivation — the lack of a mother in a child's life, considered a cause of psychological problems later in life
  • media access control — (networking)   (MAC) The lower sublayer of the OSI data link layer. The interface between a node's Logical Link Control and the network's physical layer. The MAC differs for various physical media. See also MAC Address, Ethernet, IEEE 802.3, token ring.
  • medical practitioner — doctor
  • medieval warm period — the time, c900–1400, during which warmer temperatures existed in many parts of the world. Abbreviation: MWP.
  • 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).
  • memory address space — (architecture)   1. Any part of a processor's address space that is occupied by memory. 2. The range of addresses seen by a memory device relative to the base address at which it is mapped into the processor's address space.
  • meta-dichlorobenzene — a colorless liquid, C 6 H 4 Cl 2 , soluble in alcohol and ether: used as a fumigant and insecticide.
  • microwave background — a background of microwave electromagnetic radiation with a black-body spectrum discovered in 1965, understood to be the thermal remnant of the big bang with which the universe began
  • midcourse correction — a navigational correction made in the course of a ship, airplane, rocket, or space vehicle at some point between the beginning and end of the journey.
  • model-view-presenter — (programming)   (MVP) A user interface architectural pattern where functions are separated between the model, view and presenter. The model defines the data to be displayed or otherwise acted upon in the user interface. The view displays data from the model and routes user commands (events) to the presenter to act upon that data. The presenter retrieves data from the model and displays it in the view. The implementation of MVP can vary as to how much presentation logic is handled by the presenter and the view. In a web application most presentation logic is usually in the view which runs in the web browser. MVP is one of the MV* variations of the MVC pattern.
  • modify a reservation — If you modify a reservation, you change a detail of a booking because someone who has booked a room has asked you to.
  • mollweide projection — homolographic projection.
  • motor neuron disease — Motor neuron disease is a disease which destroys the part of a person's nervous system that controls movement.
  • mpeg-1 audio layer 1 — (audio, compression, algorithm)   (MP1) A simple 32-subband audio compressor using a floating point representation for subband samples. Resolution and scale factor are stored for groups of 12 subsamples. MP1 is only used for Philips DCC Digital Compact cassette with data rates of 384 kbps.
  • mpeg-1 audio layer 3 — (music, file format)   (MP3) A digital audio compression algorithm that acheives a compression factor of about twelve while preserving sound quality. It does this by optimising the compression according to the range of sound that people can actually hear. MP3 is currently (July 1999) the most powerful algorithm in a series of audio encoding standards developed under the sponsorship of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and formalised by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). MP3 is very different from Layer 2, using an additional MDCT layer to increase frequency resolution. Its scale factor groups are more optimised for the human ear, and it uses nonlinear sample quantisation and Huffman coding. MP3 files (filename extension ".mp3") can be downloaded from many websites and can be played using software available for most operating systems (also downloadable), e.g. Winamp for PC, MacAmp for Macintosh, and mpeg123 for Unix. MP3 files are usually downloaded completely before playing but streaming MP3 is also possible. A program called a "ripper" can be used to copy a selection from a music CD onto your hard disk and another program called an encoder can convert it to an MP3 file.
  • mpeg-2 audio layer 3 — (compression, standard, algorithm, file format)   An extention of MPEG-1 audio layer 3 for lower sampling rates (16-24 kHz) targeting bit rates from 32-64 kbps (possibly 8-160 kbps). It is often combined with MPEG-2 LSF.
  • multi-user dimension — (games)   (MUD) (Or Multi-User Domain, originally "Multi-User Dungeon") A class of multi-player interactive game, accessible via the Internet or a modem. A MUD is like a real-time chat forum with structure; it has multiple "locations" like an adventure game and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic and a simple economic system. A MUD where characters can build more structure onto the database that represents the existing world is sometimes known as a "MUSH". Most MUDs allow you to log in as a guest to look around before you create your own character. Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU- form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the University of Essex's DEC-10 in 1979. It was a game similar to the classic Colossal Cave adventure, except that it allowed multiple people to play at the same time and interact with each other. Descendants of that game still exist today and are sometimes generically called BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth that the name MUD was trademarked to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto: "You haven't *lived* 'til you've *died* on MUD!"); however, this is false - Richard Bartle explicitly placed "MUD" in the PD in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth. Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction. Because these had an image as "research" they often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the fact that Usenet feeds have been spotty and difficult to get in the UK, made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there. AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and quickly gained popularity in the US; they became nuclei for large hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasise social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed to combat and competition. In 1991, over 50% of MUD sites are of a third major variety, LPMUD, which synthesises the combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. The trend toward greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue. The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. There is now a move afoot to deprecate the term MUD itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to the different simulation styles being explored. See also bonk/oif, FOD, link-dead, mudhead, MOO, MUCK, MUG, MUSE, chat.
  • 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.
  • mum-and-dad investor — a small-scale non-professional investor
  • neighbourhood warden — a person employed by a local authority to patrol residential areas and deal with antisocial behaviour
  • nemine contradicente — no one contradicting; unanimously.
  • net domestic product — the gross domestic product minus an allowance for the depreciation of capital goods
  • net national product — the gross national product less allowance for depreciation of capital goods. Abbreviation: NNP.
  • new democratic party — the Canadian social democratic party formed in 1961
  • nonaccidental injury — damage, such as a bruise, burn, or fracture, deliberately inflicted on a child or an old person
  • 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 atlantic drift — an ocean current flowing NE toward the British Isles, formed by the convergence of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current SE of Newfoundland.
  • north canadian river — a river in NE New Mexico, E Texas, and E Oklahoma, flowing SE to the Canadian River. 760 miles (1223 km) long.
  • north richland hills — a town in N Texas.
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