21-letter words containing o, s, k
- keep one's powder dry — to be ready for action
- keep one's voice down — If someone tells you to keep your voice down, they are asking you to speak more quietly.
- keep someone guessing — If someone keeps you guessing, they do not tell you what you want to know.
- kekule von stradonitz — Friedrich August [free-drikh ou-goo st] /ˈfri drɪx ˈaʊ gʊst/ (Show IPA), 1829–96, German chemist.
- keto-enol tautomerism — tautomerism in which the tautomers are an enol and a keto form. The change occurs by transfer of a hydrogen atom within the molecule
- keyboard send receive — (hardware) (KSR) Part of a designation for a hard-copy terminal, manufactured by Teletype Corporation. The KSR range were lower cost versions of the ASR models.
- kleine-levin syndrome — prolonged episodes of excessive sleepiness often accompanied by overeating, hallucinations, and electroencephalogram changes, usually beginning in adolescence.
- knights of st columba — an international, semi-secret fraternal and charitable order for Catholic laymen, which originated in New Haven, Connecticut in 1882 (the Knights of Columbus)
- knock someone for six — to upset or overwhelm someone completely; stun
- know someone by sight — If you know someone by sight, you can recognize them when you see them, although you have never met them and talked to them.
- korsakoff's psychosis — a mental illness involving severe confusion and inability to retain recent memories, usually caused by alcoholism
- lexical decision task — an experimental task in which subjects have to decide as fast as possible whether a given letter string is a word
- like a shag on a rock — abandoned and alone
- look to one's laurels — any tree of the genus Laurus.
- luck was on sb's side — If you say that luck was on someone's side, you mean that they succeeded in something by chance as well as by their own efforts or ability.
- make (both) ends meet — to manage to keep one's expenses within one's income
- make a pig of oneself — If you say that someone is making a pig of themselves, you are criticizing them for eating a very large amount at one meal.
- make one's blood boil — the fluid that circulates in the principal vascular system of human beings and other vertebrates, in humans consisting of plasma in which the red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets are suspended.
- make one's gorge rise — a narrow cleft with steep, rocky walls, especially one through which a stream runs.
- make one's peace with — the normal, nonwarring condition of a nation, group of nations, or the world.
- make up for lost time — compensate for past inaction
- make yourself at home — settle in
- mask read-only memory — (storage) (MROM) A kind of ROM in which the memory contents are determined by one of the masks used to manufacture the integrated circuit. MROM can give high storage density (bits per millimeter squared) making it a cheap solution for high volume applications.
- mauna kea observatory — an astronomical observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, situated at an altitude of 13,600 feet (4145 meters).
- medical social worker — a person who works in a hospital and is responsible for offering counselling to patients and their families and ensuring that discharged patients will receive appropriate care in the community
- meter-kilogram-second — of or relating to the system of units in which the meter, kilogram, and second are the principal units of length, mass, and time. Abbreviation: mks, MKS.
- national park service — a division of the Department of the Interior, created in 1916, that administers national parks, monuments, historic sites, and recreational areas.
- national savings bank — (in Britain) a government savings bank, run through the post office, esp for small savers
- network administrator — (job) A person who manages a communications network within an organisation. Responsibilities include network security, installing new applications, distributing software upgrades, monitoring daily activity, enforcing licensing agreements, developing a storage management program and providing for routine backups.
- network filing system — (spelling) Misnomer for Network File System.
- no smoke without fire — the evidence strongly suggests something has indeed happened
- object request broker — (programming) (ORB) Part of the OMG CORBA specification, an ORB's basic function is to pass method invocation requests to the correct objects and return the results to the caller. To achieve this the ORB must be able must be able to identify and locate objects, handle connections from invoker and the data returned from methods. Communication between the ORB and applications are achieved through IDL stubs and skeletons whilst the OMG has specified IIOP as the protocol through which ORBs may communicate with each other. Using IIOP, an ORB may request method invocations from a remote object.
- packed encoding rules — (protocol, standard) (PER) ASN.1 encoding rules for producing a compact transfer syntax for data structures described in ASN.1, defined in 1994. PER provides a much more compact encoding then BER. It tries to represents the data units using the minimum number of bits. The compactness requires that the decoder knows the complete abstract syntax of the data structure to be decoded, however. Documents: ITU-T X.691, ISO 8825-2.
- paper over the cracks — conceal flaws or problems
- pick someone's brains — to obtain information or ideas from someone
- ploughman's spikenard — a European plant, Inula conyza, with tubular yellowish flower heads surrounded by purple bracts: family Asteraceae (composites)
- poke borak at someone — to jeer at someone
- protestant work ethic — work ethic.
- put someone's back up — to annoy someone
- rap over the knuckles — to reprimand
- rocky mountain locust — a migratory locust, Melanoplus spretus, that occurs in North America, especially the Great Plains, where swarms cause great damage to crops and other vegetation.
- rocky mountain oyster — mountain oyster.
- s-k reduction machine — An abstract machine defined by Professor David Turner to evaluate combinator expressions represented as binary graphs. Named after the two basic combinators, S and K.
- safe in the knowledge — If you do something safe in the knowledge that something else is the case, you do the first thing confidently because you are sure of the second thing.
- scarlet monkey flower — any of various plants belonging to the genus Mimulus, of the figwort family, as M. cardinalis (scarlet monkey flower) having spotted flowers that resemble a face.
- school of hard knocks — the experience gained from living, especially from disappointment and hard work, regarded as a means of education: The only school he ever attended was the school of hard knocks.
- sequoia national park — a national park in central California: giant sequoia trees. 604 sq. mi. (1565 sq. km).
- sick to one's stomach — afflicted with ill health or disease; ailing.
- sink one's teeth into — to displace part of the volume of a supporting substance or object and become totally or partially submerged or enveloped; fall or descend into or below the surface or to the bottom (often followed by in or into): The battleship sank within two hours. His foot sank in the mud. Her head sinks into the pillows.
- skeleton at the feast — a person or event that brings gloom or sadness to an occasion of joy or celebration