20-letter words containing p, t
- laboratory equipment — apparatus for scientific research and experiments
- language development — the development verbal communication skills in children
- law of superposition — Geology. a basic law of geochronology, stating that in any undisturbed sequence of rocks deposited in layers, the youngest layer is on top and the oldest on bottom, each layer being younger than the one beneath it and older than the one above it.
- legal representation — representation by a lawyer
- liberty of the press — freedom of the press.
- 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.
- like death warmed up — very ill
- linear extrapolation — Statistics, Mathematics. extrapolation using a linear equation to estimate the value of a variable or function outside the tabulated or observed range.
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- liquidity preference — (in Keynesian economics) the degree of individual preference for cash over less liquid assets.
- 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.
- little pee dee river — a river in S North Carolina and N South Carolina, flowing S and SE to the Pee Dee River. 90 miles (145 km) long.
- little ringed plover — a small grey and brown coloured plover which breeds in Europe and Asia and migrates to Africa for winter
- llywelyn ap iorwerth — called Llywelyn the Great. died 1240, prince of Gwynedd, N Wales (1194–1238), who extended his rule over most of Wales
- long topgallant mast — a single spar fitted above a topmast to carry topgallants, a royal, and all sails above.
- 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.
- lump in one's throat — the passage from the mouth to the stomach or to the lungs, including the pharynx, esophagus, larynx, and trachea.
- 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
- make sheep's eyes at — to look shyly but amorously at
- 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
- material implication — equivalence (def 4a).
- maternal deprivation — the lack of a mother in a child's life, considered a cause of psychological problems later in life
- 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 parliament — A Member of Parliament is a person who has been elected by the people in a particular area to represent them in a country's parliament. The abbreviation MP is often used.
- member of the public — a member of the general population
- methyl propyl ketone — a colorless, slightly water-soluble liquid, C 5 H 1 0 O, used chiefly as a solvent, especially in lacquers.
- microelectrophoresis — any of several techniques for observing, by means of a microscope or an ultramicroscope, the electrophoresis of minute surface particles.
- military superiority — the power, strength, or numbers of armed forces of a country viewed as an advantage over another country
- 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.
- model-view-presenter — (programming) (MVP) A user interface architectural pattern where functions are separated between the model, view and presenter. The model defines the data to be displayed or otherwise acted upon in the user interface. The view displays data from the model and routes user commands (events) to the presenter to act upon that data. The presenter retrieves data from the model and displays it in the view. The implementation of MVP can vary as to how much presentation logic is handled by the presenter and the view. In a web application most presentation logic is usually in the view which runs in the web browser. MVP is one of the MV* variations of the MVC pattern.
- mollweide projection — homolographic projection.
- mopping-up operation — an operation after a battle or campaign to root out remaining enemy forces or installations
- mother of the chapel — (in British trade unions in the publishing and printing industries) a woman shop steward
- mother-of-pearl moth — a pyralid moth, Pleuroptya ruralis, having a pale sheen, that is often seen around nettles, on which its green larvae feed
- multipart stationery — continuous stationery comprising two or more sheets, either carbonless or with carbon paper between the sheets
- multiple inheritance — (programming) In object-oriented programming, the possibility that a class may have more than one direct superclass in the class hierarchy. The opposite is single inheritance.
- multiple personality — a rare disorder in which an individual displays several functionally dissociated personalities, each of a complexity comparable to that of a normal individual.
- multiplication table — Arithmetic. a tabular listing of the products of any two numbers of a set, usually of the integers 1 through 10 or 1 through 12.