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20-letter words containing r, e, s, o, u

  • judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
  • 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.
  • keep your mouth shut — If you keep your mouth shut about something, you do not talk about it, especially because it is a secret.
  • keratoconjunctivitis — inflammation of the cornea and conjunctiva.
  • keyboard video mouse — (hardware)   (KVM) Used to describe a "KVM switch" that allows one keyboard, one video display and one mouse to be switched between two or more computers.
  • kluver-bucy syndrome — a syndrome caused by bilateral injury to the temporal lobes and characterized by memory defect, hypersexuality, excessive oral behavior, and diminished fear reactions.
  • labour-saving device — a machine, gadget, etc, that reduces (human) effort, hard work or labour
  • lampbrush chromosome — a chromosome with looped projections resembling a brush
  • languedoc-roussillon — a region of S France, on the Gulf of Lions: consists of the departments of Lozère, Gard, Hérault, Aude, and Pyrénées-Orientales; mainly mountainous with a coastal plain
  • laurentian mountains — a range of low mountains in E Canada, in Quebec between the St Lawrence River and Hudson Bay. Highest point: 1191 m (3905 ft)
  • law of large numbers — the theorem in probability theory that the number of successes increases as the number of experiments increases and approximates the probability times the number of experiments for a large number of experiments.
  • 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.
  • law-and-order issues — issues concerning law and social conventions
  • least-squares method — a method of estimating values from a set of observations by minimizing the sum of the squares of the differences between the observations and the values to be found.
  • 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.
  • like a house on fire — If two people get on like a house on fire, they quickly become close friends, for example because they have many interests in common.
  • linguistic geography — dialect geography.
  • liturgy of the hours — a revision (promulgated in 1970) of the arrangement and texts of the Divine Office
  • lonely hearts column — the part of a newspaper or magazine where lonely hearts ads appear
  • lou gehrig's disease — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
  • love's labour's lost — a comedy (1594–95?) by Shakespeare.
  • lump in one's throat — the passage from the mouth to the stomach or to the lungs, including the pharynx, esophagus, larynx, and trachea.
  • 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.
  • magical mystery tour — something exciting and mysterious; esp an exploration of a new place where somebody being shown or taken around does not know where exactly they will be going
  • 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.
  • mary, queen of scots — family name Stuart. 1542–87, queen of Scotland (1542–67); daughter of James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise. She was married to Francis II of France (1558–60), her cousin Lord Darnley (1565–67), and the Earl of Bothwell (1567–71), who was commonly regarded as Darnley's murderer. She was forced to abdicate in favour of her son (later James VI of Scotland) and fled to England. Imprisoned by Elizabeth I until 1587, she was beheaded for plotting against the English crown
  • mass-energy equation — the equation, E=mc2, formulated by Albert Einstein, expressing the equivalence between mass and energy, where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the velocity of light.
  • measure one's length — to fall, lie, or be thrown down at full length
  • meissner's corpuscle — tactile corpuscle.
  • membranous labyrinth — an intricate combination of paths or passages in which it is difficult to find one's way or to reach the exit. Synonyms: maze, network, web.
  • menstrual extraction — an abortion procedure involving suction aspiration of the uterine contents early in gestation, before the first missed menstrual period: sometimes performed later.
  • 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.
  • midcourse correction — a navigational correction made in the course of a ship, airplane, rocket, or space vehicle at some point between the beginning and end of the journey.
  • miliary tuberculosis — tuberculosis in which the bacilli are spread by the blood from one point of infection, producing small tubercles in other parts of the body.
  • military superiority — the power, strength, or numbers of armed forces of a country viewed as an advantage over another country
  • molecular gastronomy — an approach to cooking in which a chef’s knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology allows him or her to experiment with unusual flavour combinations and cooking techniques
  • molecular geneticist — a specialist in the study of the molecular constitution of genes and chromosomes
  • moreton bay chestnut — an Australian leguminous tree, Castanospermum australe, having thin smooth bark and yellow or reddish flowers: used in furniture manufacture
  • most general unifier — (logic)   If U is the most general unifier of a set of expressions then any other unifier, V, can be expressed as V = UW, where W is another substitution. See also unification.
  • motor neuron disease — Motor neuron disease is a disease which destroys the part of a person's nervous system that controls movement.
  • mountain rescue team — a group of people who conduct search and rescue on a mountain, for example of someone who has fallen, got lost, etc
  • muller-lyer illusion — a geometric illusion in which two lines of equal length appear unequal depending on whether angular lines forming arrowheads at each end point toward or away from each other.
  • multi-user dimension — (games)   (MUD) (Or Multi-User Domain, originally "Multi-User Dungeon") A class of multi-player interactive game, accessible via the Internet or a modem. A MUD is like a real-time chat forum with structure; it has multiple "locations" like an adventure game and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic and a simple economic system. A MUD where characters can build more structure onto the database that represents the existing world is sometimes known as a "MUSH". Most MUDs allow you to log in as a guest to look around before you create your own character. Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU- form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the University of Essex's DEC-10 in 1979. It was a game similar to the classic Colossal Cave adventure, except that it allowed multiple people to play at the same time and interact with each other. Descendants of that game still exist today and are sometimes generically called BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth that the name MUD was trademarked to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto: "You haven't *lived* 'til you've *died* on MUD!"); however, this is false - Richard Bartle explicitly placed "MUD" in the PD in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth. Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction. Because these had an image as "research" they often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the fact that Usenet feeds have been spotty and difficult to get in the UK, made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there. AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and quickly gained popularity in the US; they became nuclei for large hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasise social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed to combat and competition. In 1991, over 50% of MUD sites are of a third major variety, LPMUD, which synthesises the combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. The trend toward greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue. The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. There is now a move afoot to deprecate the term MUD itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to the different simulation styles being explored. See also bonk/oif, FOD, link-dead, mudhead, MOO, MUCK, MUG, MUSE, chat.
  • multipart stationery — continuous stationery comprising two or more sheets, either carbonless or with carbon paper between the sheets
  • 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.
  • multipurpose vehicle — a large car, similar to a van, designed to carry up to eight passengers
  • multistep hydroplane — a motorship having a flat bottom built as a series of planes inclined forward, the ship planing on each from stem to stern as its speed increases.
  • multistorey car park — a car park consisting of several levels
  • mum-and-dad investor — a small-scale non-professional investor
  • music of the spheres — a music, imperceptible to human ears, formerly supposed to be produced by the movements of the spheres or heavenly bodies.
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