20-letter words containing p, e, c, t, o, r
- electrophysiological — Of or pertaining to electrophysiology.
- electroshock therapy — a form of shock therapy in which electric current is applied to the brain
- environmental impact — the impact on the environment created by an industry, service, plan, or project
- father of the chapel — (in British trade unions in the publishing and printing industries) a shop steward
- feather in one's cap — one of the horny structures forming the principal covering of birds, consisting typically of a hard, tubular portion attached to the body and tapering into a thinner, stemlike portion bearing a series of slender, barbed processes that interlock to form a flat structure on each side.
- file descriptor leak — (programming) (Or "fd leak" /F D leek/) A kind of programming bug analogous to a core leak, in which a program fails to close file descriptors ("fd"s) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually runs out of them. See leak.
- fixed action pattern — a highly stereotyped pattern of behavior that is characteristic of a particular species.
- fixed-price contract — a contract in which the price is preset and invariable, regardless of the actual costs of production.
- flat-plate collector — a type of solar collector consisting of a series of flat glass or plastic plates with black metal surfaces that absorb solar energy.
- floodlight projector — a powerful lamp having a reflector curved to produce a floodlight.
- frontenac et palluau — Comte de (Louis de Buade) 1620?–98, French governor of New France 1672–82, 1689–98.
- general practitioner — a medical practitioner whose practice is not limited to any specific branch of medicine or class of diseases. Abbreviation: G.P.
- 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.
- 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.
- hampton court palace — a royal palace in Hampton, London, built in 1515 by Cardinal Wolsey
- 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.
- heteropolysaccharide — (carbohydrate) any polysaccharide formed from two or more different kinds of monosaccharide.
- hieroglyphic hittite — an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of Indo-European, written in a pictographic script in Syria c1200–c600 b.c.: the same language as written in cuneiform in Anatolia is known as Luwian.
- 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.
- hydrostatic pressure — Hydrostatic pressure is the pressure exerted by a liquid that depends on how deep it is.
- hyperadrenocorticism — Cushing's syndrome.
- hyperbolic cotangent — a hyperbolic function that is the ratio of cosh to sinh, being the reciprocal of tanh; coth
- hypercholesterolemia — the presence of an excessive amount of cholesterol in the blood.
- hypercholesterolemic — (pathology) Of, pertaining to, or having hypercholesterolemia.
- hyperhomocysteinemia — (medicine) The presence of an excessive amount of homocysteine in the blood.
- hypodermic injection — the injection of a medicine or drug under the skin
- imperfect contrition — sincere penitence or remorse.
- imported currantworm — the larva of any of several insects, as a sawfly, Nematus ribesii (imported currantworm) which infests and feeds on the leaves and fruit of currants.
- income tax inspector — a person whose job is to assess individuals' income tax liability
- incorporated company — a legally constituted company
- indicated horsepower — the horsepower of a reciprocating engine as shown by an indicator record. Abbreviation: ihp, IHP.
- 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.
- 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
- james prescott joule — James Prescott, 1818–89, English physicist.
- 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.
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- 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.
- magnetoencephalogram — a record of the magnetic field of the brain. Abbreviation: MEG.
- material implication — equivalence (def 4a).
- 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.
- member of the public — a member of the general population
- microelectrophoresis — any of several techniques for observing, by means of a microscope or an ultramicroscope, the electrophoresis of minute surface particles.