20-letter words containing o, d, s, m
- diamond skin disease — a form of swine erysipelas in which diamond-shaped skin inflammations appear, often accompanied by swollen joints.
- dichotomous question — a question to which there can only be one of two answers, often "yes" or "no"
- dimensional analysis — a method for comparing the dimensions of the physical quantities occurring in a problem to find relationships between the quantities without having to solve the problem completely. Compare dimension (def 6).
- diplomatic secretary — secretary (def 5).
- diplomatic-secretary — secretary (def 5).
- direct memory access — (architecture) (DMA) A facility of some architectures which allows a peripheral to read and write memory without intervention by the CPU. DMA is a limited form of bus mastering.
- discretionary income — money for luxuries
- displacement tonnage — the number of long tons of water displaced by a vessel, light or load displacement being specified.
- district of columbia — a federal area in the E United States, on the Potomac, coextensive with the federal capital, Washington. 69 sq. mi. (179 sq. km). Abbreviation: DC (for use with zip code), D.C.
- do someone a service — If you do someone a service, you do something that helps or benefits them.
- do someone's bidding — command; summons; invitation: I went there at his bidding.
- domestic heating oil — a liquid petroleum product used to fuel residential building furnaces or boilers
- double decomposition — a reaction whose result is the interchange of two parts of two substances to form two new substances, as AgNO 3 + NaCl → AgCl + NaNO 3 .
- drum and bugle corps — a marching band of drum players and buglers.
- drunk mouse syndrome — (Also "mouse on drugs") A malady exhibited by the mouse pointing device of some computers. The typical symptom is for the mouse cursor on the screen to move in random directions and not in sync with the motion of the actual mouse. Can usually be corrected by unplugging the mouse and plugging it back again. Another recommended fix for optical mice is to rotate your mouse mat 90 degrees. At Xerox PARC in the 1970s, most people kept a can of copier cleaner (isopropyl alcohol) at their desks. When the steel ball on the mouse had picked up enough cruft to be unreliable, the mouse was doused in cleaner, which restored it for a while. However, this operation left a fine residue that accelerated the accumulation of cruft, so the dousings became more and more frequent. Finally, the mouse was declared "alcoholic" and sent to the clinic to be dried out in a CFC ultrasonic bath.
- early modern english — the English language represented in printed documents of the period starting with Caxton (1476) and ending with Dryden (1700).
- early sunday morning — a painting (1930) by Edward Hopper.
- economic determinism — the doctrine that all social, cultural, political, and intellectual forms are determined by or result from such economic factors as the quality of natural resources, productive capability, technological development, or the distribution of wealth.
- electrohydrodynamics — (physics) the study of the dynamics of electrically conducting fluid.
- endorsement in blank — an endorsement on a bill of exchange, cheque, etc, naming no payee and thus making the endorsed sum payable to the bearer
- essential amino acid — an amino acid that cannot be synthesized in the body and is thus an essential component of the diet
- estrela mountain dog — a sturdy well-built dog of a Portuguese breed with a long thick coat and a thick tuft of hair round the neck, often used as a guard dog
- field ion microscope — a device in which the atomic structure of the surface of a conductor is made visible by introducing helium gas into the device and applying a high voltage to ionize and accelerate the gas toward a fluorescent screen.
- field-ion microscope — a device in which the atomic structure of the surface of a conductor is made visible by introducing helium gas into the device and applying a high voltage to ionize and accelerate the gas toward a fluorescent screen.
- first world problems — If you say that someone has First World problems, you mean that their problems are not really very important.
- force someone's hand — to force someone to act
- freedom of the press — the right to publish newspapers, magazines, and other printed matter without governmental restriction and subject only to the laws of libel, obscenity, sedition, etc.
- fundamental constant — a physical constant, such as the gravitational constant or speed of light, that plays a fundamental role in physics and chemistry and usually has an accurately known value
- gastroduodenostomies — Plural form of gastroduodenostomy.
- go from bad to worse — worsen
- go to someone's head — to confuse, excite, or intoxicate someone
- goldenhar's syndrome — a congenital disorder in which one side of the face is malformed, often with an enlargement of one side of the mouth. There may also be hearing loss, curvature of the spine, and mild retardation
- green monkey disease — Marburg disease.
- grievous bodily harm — law: serious injury
- hudson's bay company — a company chartered in England in 1670 to carry on fur trading with the Indians in North America.
- hyperadrenocorticism — Cushing's syndrome.
- industrial democracy — control of an organization by the people who work for it, esp by workers holding positions on its board of directors
- information builders — Distributors of LEVEL5 OBJECT. Telephone +1 800 969 INFO.
- information industry — businesses that involve collecting and using information
- intermediate section — The intermediate section is the section of the borehole after the top hole, which has more consolidated rock.
- internal hemorrhoids — Usually, hemorrhoids. Pathology. an abnormally enlarged vein mainly due to a persistent increase in venous pressure, occurring inside the anal sphincter of the rectum and beneath the mucous membrane (internal hemorrhoid) or outside the anal sphincter and beneath the surface of the anal skin (external hemorrhoid)
- inventory adjustment — Inventory adjustments are increases or decreases made in inventory to account for theft, loss, breakages, and errors in the amount or number of items received.
- justifiable homicide — murder committed under extenuating circumstances
- keyboard video mouse — (hardware) (KVM) Used to describe a "KVM switch" that allows one keyboard, one video display and one mouse to be switched between two or more computers.
- kluver-bucy syndrome — a syndrome caused by bilateral injury to the temporal lobes and characterized by memory defect, hypersexuality, excessive oral behavior, and diminished fear reactions.
- lead someone a dance — to cause someone continued worry and exasperation; play up
- 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.
- loyal order of moose — See under moose (def 2).
- 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.
- magnetohydrodynamics — the branch of physics that deals with the motion of electrically conductive fluids, especially plasmas, in magnetic fields. Abbreviation: MHD.