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20-letter words containing o, p, r, t, u

  • for sb's consumption — If you do or say something for a particular person's or group's consumption, you do or say it especially for them, although your private thoughts or plans may be very different.
  • freight pass-through — a special allowance or discounted price given a bookseller or bookstore by a publishing house for paying the freight charge on a shipment of books ordered: so called because the shipping charge is passed on to the consumer by an increase in the suggested retail price for each book. Abbreviation: FPT.
  • frontenac et palluau — Comte de (Louis de Buade) 1620?–98, French governor of New France 1672–82, 1689–98.
  • general postal union — former name of Universal Postal Union. Abbreviation: GPU.
  • get a real computer! — (jargon)   A typical hacker response to news that somebody is having trouble getting work done on a toy system or bitty box. The threshold for "real computer" rises with time. As of mid-1993 it meant multi-tasking, with a hard disk, and an address space bigger than 16 megabytes. At this time, according to GLS, computers with character-only displays were verging on "unreal". In 2001, a real computer has a one gigahertz processor, 128 MB of RAM, 20 GB of hard disk, and runs Linux.
  • gorno-altai republic — a constituent republic of S Russia: mountainous, rising over 4350 m (14 500 ft) in the Altai Mountains of the south. Capital: Gorno-Altaisk. Pop: 202 900 (2002). Area: 92 600 sq km (35 740 sq miles)
  • group of twenty-four — a group of twenty-four rich and industrialized countries of the world, whose heads of government meet regularly to coordinate the position of developing countries on monetary and development issues
  • group representation — representation in a governing body on the basis of interests rather than by geographical location.
  • hampton court palace — a royal palace in Hampton, London, built in 1515 by Cardinal Wolsey
  • happy hunting ground — the North American Indian heaven, conceived of as a paradise of hunting and feasting for warriors and hunters.
  • hate a person's guts — to dislike a person very strongly
  • hospitality industry — the hotel and accommodation industry
  • houses of parliament — In Britain, the Houses of Parliament are the British parliament, which consists of two parts, the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The buildings where the British parliament does its work are also called the Houses of Parliament.
  • human genome project — a federally funded U.S. scientific project to identify both the genes and the entire sequence of DNA base pairs that make up the human genome.
  • hydrostatic pressure — Hydrostatic pressure is the pressure exerted by a liquid that depends on how deep it is.
  • ignotum per ignotius — an explanation that is obscurer than the thing to be explained
  • imported currantworm — the larva of any of several insects, as a sawfly, Nematus ribesii (imported currantworm) which infests and feeds on the leaves and fruit of currants.
  • in (or out of) play — in (or not in) the condition for continuing play
  • in the lap of luxury — If you say that someone lives in the lap of luxury, you mean that they live in conditions of great comfort and wealth.
  • industrial espionage — the stealing of technological or commercial research data, blueprints, plans, etc., as by a person in the hire of a competing company.
  • instruction prefetch — (architecture)   A technique which attempts to minimise the time a processor spends waiting for instructions to be fetched from memory. Instructions following the one currently being executed are loaded into a prefetch queue when the processor's external bus is otherwise idle. If the processor executes a branch instruction or receives an interrupt then the queue must be flushed and reloaded from the new address. Instruction prefetch is often combined with pipelining in an attempt to keep the pipeline busy. By 1995 most processors used prefetching, e.g. Motorola 680x0, Intel 80x86.
  • insulin-coma therapy — a former treatment for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, employing insulin-induced hypoglycemia as a method for producing convulsive seizures.
  • james prescott joule — James Prescott, 1818–89, English physicist.
  • keep your mouth shut — If you keep your mouth shut about something, you do not talk about it, especially because it is a secret.
  • kruger national park — a wildlife sanctuary in NE South Africa: the world's largest game reserve. Area: over 21 700 sq km (8400 sq miles)
  • laboratory equipment — apparatus for scientific research and experiments
  • law of superposition — Geology. a basic law of geochronology, stating that in any undisturbed sequence of rocks deposited in layers, the youngest layer is on top and the oldest on bottom, each layer being younger than the one beneath it and older than the one above it.
  • life-support machine — A life-support machine is the equipment that is used to keep a person alive when they are very ill and cannot breathe without help.
  • light the touchpaper — to do something that will cause much anger or excitement
  • linguistic geography — dialect geography.
  • lump in one's throat — the passage from the mouth to the stomach or to the lungs, including the pharynx, esophagus, larynx, and trachea.
  • lymphogranulomatosis — widespread infectious granuloma of the lymphatic system.
  • member of the public — a member of the general population
  • military superiority — the power, strength, or numbers of armed forces of a country viewed as an advantage over another country
  • 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 personality — a rare disorder in which an individual displays several functionally dissociated personalities, each of a complexity comparable to that of a normal individual.
  • multiplicative group — a group in which the operation of the group is multiplication.
  • multipurpose vehicle — a large car, similar to a van, designed to carry up to eight passengers
  • 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.
  • multistorey car park — a car park consisting of several levels
  • music of the spheres — a music, imperceptible to human ears, formerly supposed to be produced by the movements of the spheres or heavenly bodies.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • neuropsychiatrically — In terms of neuropsychiatry.
  • next program counter — (architecture)   (nPC) A register in a CPU that contains the address of the instruction to be executed next.
  • 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
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