20-letter words containing p, c, e
- incomprehensibleness — The state of being incomprehensible.
- incorporated company — a legally constituted company
- independence of path — the property of a function for which the line integral has the same value along all curves between two specified points.
- indicated horsepower — the horsepower of a reciprocating engine as shown by an indicator record. Abbreviation: ihp, IHP.
- infectious hepatitis — hepatitis A.
- insolvency provision — the right of employees of a firm that goes bankrupt or into receivership to receive money owed to them as wages, etc
- 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.
- interference pattern — a series of alternating dark and bright bands produced as a result of light interference.
- interplanetary space — the region of space occurring around the sun and planets of the solar system. The density is normally negligible although cosmic rays, meteorites, gas clouds, etc, can occur
- isometric projection — a type of axonometric projection in which the object is shown with its three principal axes all equally tilted from the plane of viewing, with two of them usually tilted 30 degrees upward from the horizontal
- jacopo della quercia — Jacopo Della [yah-kaw-paw del-lah] /ˈyɑ kɔ pɔ ˌdɛl lɑ/ (Show IPA), 1374?–1438, Italian sculptor.
- james prescott joule — James Prescott, 1818–89, English physicist.
- japanese honeysuckle — a climbing honeysuckle, Lonicera japonica, introduced into the eastern U.S. from Asia, having fragrant, white flowers that fade to yellow.
- judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
- juno and the paycock — a play (1924) by Sean O'Casey.
- justice of the peace — a local public officer, usually having jurisdiction to try and determine minor civil and criminal cases and to hold preliminary examinations of persons accused of more serious crimes, and having authority to administer oaths, solemnize marriages, etc.
- keep a straight face — look serious, avoid smiling
- keep one's pecker up — If you tell someone to keep their pecker up, you are encouraging them to be cheerful in a difficult situation.
- king charles spaniel — a variety of the English toy spaniel having a black-and-tan coat.
- kleene, stephen cole — Stephen Kleene
- knockout competition — used to describe a competition in which competitors are eliminated progressively
- lampbrush chromosome — a chromosome with looped projections resembling a brush
- lavaliere microphone — a small microphone that hangs around the neck of a performer or speaker.
- 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
- light-weight process — (operating system, parallel) (LWP) A single-threaded sub-process which, unlike a thread, has its own process identifier and may also differ in its inheritance and controlling features. Several operating systems, e.g. SunOS 5.x, provide system calls for creating and controlling LWPs.
- lighthouse coffeepot — a coffeepot of the late 17th and 18th centuries, having a tapering, circular body with a domed lid.
- linear address space — A memory addressing scheme used in processors where the whole memory can be accessed using a single address that fits in a single register or instruction. This contrasts with a segmented memory architecture, such as that used on the Intel 8086, where an address is given by an offset from a base address held in one of the "segment registers". Linear addressing greatly simplifies programming at the assembly language level but requires more instruction word bits to be allocated for an address.
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- liquidity preference — (in Keynesian economics) the degree of individual preference for cash over less liquid assets.
- lost property office — room for mislaid objects
- lower layer protocol — (networking, protocol) (LLP, or lower-layer protocol) Any protocol residing in OSI layers one to four. These protocols package, route, verify and transmit datagrams. A prime example would be TCP/IP. Lower layer protocols support the upper layer protocols.
- lunisolar precession — the principal component of the precession of the equinoxes, produced by the gravitational attraction of the sun and the moon on the equatorial bulge of the earth.
- 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
- material implication — equivalence (def 4a).
- mechanical impedance — impedance (def 2).
- mechanical-impedance — Electricity. the total opposition to alternating current by an electric circuit, equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the resistance and reactance of the circuit and usually expressed in ohms. Symbol: Z.
- medical practitioner — doctor
- 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.
- meissner's corpuscle — tactile corpuscle.
- member of the public — a member of the general population
- memory address space — (architecture) 1. Any part of a processor's address space that is occupied by memory. 2. The range of addresses seen by a memory device relative to the base address at which it is mapped into the processor's address space.
- 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.
- microelectrophoresis — any of several techniques for observing, by means of a microscope or an ultramicroscope, the electrophoresis of minute surface particles.