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20-letter words containing o, g, d, a

  • infrared photography — photography using film with an emulsion that is sensitive to infrared light, enabling it to be used in misty weather, in darkened interiors, or at night. It has applications in aerial surveys, the detection of forgeries, etc
  • 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.
  • into/in cold storage — If you put an idea or plan into cold storage or in cold storage, you delay it for a while rather than acting on it as you originally intended.
  • intravenous drug use — the injection of drugs intravenously
  • japanese pagoda tree — pagoda tree.
  • judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
  • knock-down, drag-out — characterized by great violence, harshness, animosity, etc.
  • knowledge management — data technology
  • laboratory diagnosis — scientific analysis of a disease
  • labour-saving device — a machine, gadget, etc, that reduces (human) effort, hard work or labour
  • language development — the development verbal communication skills in children
  • 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
  • laugh one's head off — Phrases such as laugh your head off and scream your head off can be used to emphasize that someone is laughing or screaming a lot or very loudly.
  • long island iced tea — a potent cocktail consisting of equal parts of, typically, five different distilled alcoholic liquors, usually vodka, gin, rum, tequila, and triple sec, with a small amount of mixer, usually cola
  • longitude by account — the longitude of the position of a vessel as estimated by dead reckoning.
  • 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.
  • longitudinal section — the representation of an object as it would appear if cut by the vertical plane passing through the longest axis of the object.
  • 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.
  • macular degeneration — degeneration of the central portion of the retina, resulting in a loss of sharp vision.
  • magnetic declination — variation (def 8).
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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).
  • 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
  • monosodium glutamate — a white, crystalline, water-soluble powder, C 5 H 8 NNaO 4 ⋅H 2 O, used to intensify the flavor of foods.
  • 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.
  • neighbourhood warden — a person employed by a local authority to patrol residential areas and deal with antisocial behaviour
  • new england theology — Calvinism as modified and interpreted by the descendants of the Puritans in New England, especially Jonathan Edwards, becoming the dominant theology there from about 1730 to 1880.
  • nodding acquaintance — a slight, incomplete, or superficial knowledge (of something or someone): He had only a nodding acquaintance with Italian and didn't trust it to get him through the tour. Although we were neighbors for several years, we had only a nodding acquaintance.
  • nonrepeating decimal — a decimal representation of any irrational number, having the property that no sequence of digits is repeated ad infinitum.
  • nostalgie de la boue — a desire for or attraction to crudity, vulgarity, depravity, etc.
  • ode on a grecian urn — a poem (1819) by Keats.
  • ode to a nightingale — a poem (1819) by Keats.
  • officer of the guard — an officer, acting under the officer of the day, who is responsible for the instruction, discipline, and performance of duty of the guard in a post, camp, or station. Abbreviation: OG, O.G.
  • omega-3 (fatty acid) — a type of polyunsaturated fatty acid in fish oil, shellfish, soybeans, etc., linked to low cholesterol and low LDL levels
  • on the drawing board — in the planning stage
  • operant conditioning — conditioning (def 1).
  • operating conditions — Operating conditions are a set of conditions for operating a particular system or process.
  • operator overloading — overloading
  • optical mark reading — the reading of marks by an optical device whereby the information can be stored in machine-readable form
  • order bill of lading — a bill of lading that is issued to the order of a shipper or consignee for delivery of the goods and that can be transferred by endorsement to third parties.
  • oxyacetylene welding — welding using an oxyacetylene burner
  • paranoid programming — (programming)   A programming style that tries to prepare for the worst external conditions, including incorrect input, resource limitations, hardware and software failure and even can't happen errors, to the fullest possible extent. While some believe in the motto "professional programming is paranoid programming", the expression usually has the connotation that the efforts are unnecessary or too costly ("Maybe this code is just paranoid programming, but I think it is necessary to avoid a possible overflow condition".)
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