20-letter words containing p, a, n, g
- legal representation — representation by a lawyer
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- literate programming — (programming, text) Combining the use of a text formatting language such as TeX and a conventional programming language so as to maintain documentation and source code together. Literate programming may use the inverse comment convention.
- llanfairpwllgwyngyll — a village in NW Wales, in SE Anglesey: reputed to be the longest place name in Great Britain when unabbreviated; means: St Mary's Church in the hollow of the white hazel near the rapid whirlpool of Llandysilio of the red cave
- llywelyn ap gruffudd — died 1282, prince of Wales (1258–82): the only Welsh ruler to be recognized as such by the English
- long topgallant mast — a single spar fitted above a topmast to carry topgallants, a royal, and all sails above.
- lymphogranulomatosis — widespread infectious granuloma of the lymphatic system.
- 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.
- mail transport agent — Message Transfer Agent
- 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.
- marginal probability — (in a multivariate distribution) the probability of one variable taking a specific value irrespective of the values of the others
- marketing department — the department of a commercial organization that deals with the marketing of products
- 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).
- mexican jumping bean — jumping bean.
- mopping-up operation — an operation after a battle or campaign to root out remaining enemy forces or installations
- 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.
- not put a foot wrong — If you never put a foot wrong, you never make any mistakes.
- 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
- 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.
- operational strategy — a plan or set of plans for successfully running a business, etc
- operator overloading — overloading
- optical mark reading — the reading of marks by an optical device whereby the information can be stored in machine-readable form
- organization expense — the costs associated with organizing a business entity and bringing it into existence
- 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).
- 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".)
- patagonian toothfish — a large food fish, Dissostichus eleginoides, found in the cold deep waters of the southern Atlantic and Indian oceans
- paternal grandfather — the father of someone's father
- paternal grandmother — the mother of someone's father
- pay through the nose — the part of the face or facial region in humans and certain animals that contains the nostrils and the organs of smell and functions as the usual passageway for air in respiration: in humans it is a prominence in the center of the face formed of bone and cartilage, serving also to modify or modulate the voice.
- 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
- personnel management — the branch of management dealing with staff recruitment and matters relating to employees
- 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.
- physiologic jaundice — a transitory jaundice that affects some infants for the first few days after birth.
- physiological saline — a salt solution that has the same osmotic pressure as that found in the blood or tissues
- piezomagnetic effect — the production of a magnetic field by applying a mechanical stress to certain crystals
- planning application — In Britain, a planning application is a formal request to a local authority for permission to build something new or to add something to an existing building.
- pledge of allegiance — a solemn oath of allegiance or fidelity to the U.S., beginning, “I pledge allegiance to the flag,” and forming part of many flag-saluting ceremonies in the U.S.
- poor man's something — a (cheaper) substitute for something