0%

20-letter words containing p, a, g, e, c

  • freefall parachuting — a variety of parachuting in which the jumper manoeuvres in free fall before opening the parachute
  • general practitioner — a medical practitioner whose practice is not limited to any specific branch of medicine or class of diseases. Abbreviation: G.P.
  • general public virus — (software, legal)   A pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or application programs incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same terms as GNU code. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft "infects" software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code.
  • 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.
  • get one's hackles up — to become tense with anger; bristle
  • glucosamine sulphate — a compound used in some herbal remedies and dietary supplements, esp to strengthen joint cartilage
  • go like the clappers — to move extremely fast
  • 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)
  • graphics accelerator — (graphics, hardware)   Hardware (often an extra circuit board) to perform tasks such as plotting lines and surfaces in two or three dimensions, filling, shading and hidden line removal.
  • group life insurance — a form of life insurance available to members of a group, typically employees of a company, under a master policy.
  • hard gelatin capsule — A hard gelatin capsule is a type of capsule that is usually used to contain medicine in the form of dry powder or very small pellets.
  • harmonic progression — a series of numbers the reciprocals of which are in arithmetic progression.
  • have an itching palm — to desire money greedily
  • helicopter parenting — a style of child rearing in which an overprotective mother or father discourages a child's independence by being too involved in the child's life: In typical helicopter parenting, a mother or father swoops in at any sign of challenge or discomfort.
  • high-energy particle — Physics
  • 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.
  • hyperbolic cotangent — a hyperbolic function that is the ratio of cosh to sinh, being the reciprocal of tanh; coth
  • judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
  • keep a straight face — look serious, avoid smiling
  • king charles spaniel — a variety of the English toy spaniel having a black-and-tan coat.
  • light the touchpaper — to do something that will cause much anger or excitement
  • linguistic geography — dialect geography.
  • 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.
  • magnetoencephalogram — a record of the magnetic field of the brain. Abbreviation: MEG.
  • malpighian corpuscle — Also called kidney corpuscle, Malpighian body. the structure at the beginning of a vertebrate nephron, consisting of a glomerulus and its surrounding Bowman's capsule.
  • matched-pairs design — (of an experiment) concerned with measuring the values of the dependent variables for pairs of subjects that have been matched to eliminate individual differences and that are respectively subjected to the control and the experimental condition
  • 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).
  • megakaryocytopoiesis — (biology) The cellular development process that leads to platelet production.
  • mexican jumping bean — jumping bean.
  • mickey mouse program — (jargon)   The North American equivalent of a "noddy program", i.e. trivial. The term doesn't necessarily have the belittling connotations of mainstream slang "Oh, that's just mickey mouse stuff!"; sometimes trivial programs can be very useful.
  • multiplicative group — a group in which the operation of the group is multiplication.
  • negative campaigning — political campaigning in which a politician or party focuses on criticizing another politician or party rather than emphasizing their own positive qualities
  • nephroangiosclerosis — (pathology) sclerosis of the renal arterioles.
  • neurophysiologically — In terms of, or with regard to, neurophysiology.
  • neuropsychologically — In terms of or by means of neuropsychology.
  • next program counter — (architecture)   (nPC) A register in a CPU that contains the address of the instruction to be executed next.
  • nonrepeating decimal — a decimal representation of any irrational number, having the property that no sequence of digits is repeated ad infinitum.
  • omega-minus particle — a baryon with strangeness −3, isotopic spin 0, and negative charge; predicted from the mathematics of the Eightfold Way and subsequently discovered. Symbol: Ω −.
  • open learning centre — an establishment which provides further education on a flexible part-time basis
  • operant conditioning — conditioning (def 1).
  • operating conditions — Operating conditions are a set of conditions for operating a particular system or process.
  • optical mark reading — the reading of marks by an optical device whereby the information can be stored in machine-readable form
  • pan-american highway — a road system proposed in the 1920s linking nations of the Western Hemisphere, extending from Alaska to Santiago, Chile, with some gaps remaining in Panama and Colombia. The section between Nuevo Laredo, Mexico and Panama City is known as the Inter-American Highway Total length about 16,000 miles (25,744 km).
  • paper chromatography — the separation of mixtures into their constituents by preferential adsorption by a solid, as a column of silica (column chromatography) or a strip of filter paper (paper chromatography) or by a gel.
  • peremptory challenge — a formal objection to the service of a juror by a party to a criminal prosecution or a civil action that requires no showing of cause.
  • perpendicular gothic — the style of Gothic architecture in England during the 14th and 15th centuries, characterized by tracery having vertical lines, a four-centred arch, and fan vaulting
  • photogelatin process — collotype (def 1).
  • phthalocyanine green — a pigment used in painting, derived from chlorinated copper phthalocyanine and characterized chiefly by its intense green color and permanence.
  • physical meteorology — the branch of meteorology dealing with the study of optical, electrical, acoustical, and thermodynamic phenomena in the atmosphere, including the physics of clouds and precipitation.
  • physiologic jaundice — a transitory jaundice that affects some infants for the first few days after birth.
Was this page helpful?
Yes No
Thank you for your feedback! Tell your friends about this page
Tell us why?