20-letter words containing p, c, o, s
- 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
- 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 one's pecker up — If you tell someone to keep their pecker up, you are encouraging them to be cheerful in a difficult situation.
- kleene, stephen cole — Stephen Kleene
- lampbrush chromosome — a chromosome with looped projections resembling a brush
- 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-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.
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- lost property office — room for mislaid objects
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- minkowski space-time — a four-dimensional space in which three coordinates specify the position of a point in space and the fourth represents the time at which an event occurred at that point
- missionary apostolic — an honorary title conferred by the pope on certain missionaries.
- multipurpose vehicle — a large car, similar to a van, designed to carry up to eight passengers
- 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.
- nephroangiosclerosis — (pathology) sclerosis of the renal arterioles.
- net domestic product — the gross domestic product minus an allowance for the depreciation of capital goods
- network transparency — (networking) A feature of an operating system or other service which lets the user access a remote resource through a network without having to know if the resource is remote or local. For example NFS allow users to access remote files as if they were local files.
- neurophysiologically — In terms of, or with regard to, neurophysiology.
- neuropsychiatrically — In terms of neuropsychiatry.
- neuropsychologically — In terms of or by means of neuropsychology.
- north celestial pole — the point of intersection of the earth's extended axis and the northern half of the celestial sphere, lying about 1° from Polaris
- obsessive-compulsive — of or relating to a personality style characterized by perfectionism, indecision, conscientiousness, concern with detail, rigidity, and inhibition.
- 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
- occupational disease — Also called industrial disease. a disease caused by the conditions or hazards of a particular occupation.
- occupational pension — a pension scheme provided for the members of a particular occupation or by a specific employer or group of employers
- 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 −.
- operating conditions — Operating conditions are a set of conditions for operating a particular system or process.
- operational calculus — a method for solving a differential equation by treating differential operators as ordinary algebraic quantities, thus obtaining a simpler problem.
- order code processor — (processor) The ICL 2900, ICL 3900 and above term for "CPU".
- orthopaedic mattress — a specially firm mattress designed to help correct or ameliorate the discomfort of disorders of the spine and joints
- orthophosphoric acid — a colorless, crystalline solid, H 3 PO 4 , the tribasic acid of pentavalent phosphorus: used chiefly in fertilizers, as a source of phosphorus salts, and in soft drinks as an acidulant and flavoring agent.
- owner-occupied house — a house that is owned by the person who lives in it
- pale western cutworm — the larva of a noctuid moth, Agrotis orthogonia, of the western U.S. and Canada, that seriously damages grains, beets, potatoes, alfalfa, etc., by feeding underground on roots and stems.
- paper qualifications — qualifications gained through official examinations, etc, rather than through experience
- parametric equations — one of two or more equations expressing the location of a point on a curve or surface by determining each coordinate separately.
- parataxic distortion — a distortion in perception, especially of interpersonal relationships, based on a tendency to perceive others in accordance with a pattern determined by previous experiences.
- particulars of claim — (in England) the first reading made by the claimant in a county court action, showing the facts upon which he or she relies in support of a claim and the relief asked for