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18-letter words containing s, a, m, o, y

  • isoamyl salicylate — a colorless, sometimes slightly yellow, synthetic oil, C 12 H 16 O 3 , having an orchidlike odor: used in perfumery.
  • james-lange theory — a theory that emotions are caused by bodily sensations; for example, we are sad because we weep
  • jerusalem syndrome — a delusive condition affecting some visitors to Jerusalem in which the sufferer identifies with a major figure from his or her religious background
  • lay down your arms — If soldiers lay down their arms, they stop fighting and give up their weapons.
  • loosestrife family — the plant family Lythraceae, characterized by herbaceous plants, shrubs, and trees having usually opposite or whorled, simple leaves, clusters of flowers, and fruit in the form of a capsule, and including the crape myrtle, loosestrifes of the genus Lythrum, and the henna shrub.
  • magic switch story — Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no-one knows who). You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labelled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words "magic" and "more magic". The switch was in the "more magic" position. I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side. It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed. Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the "more magic" position before reviving the computer. A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the "more magic" position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch. The computer promptly crashed. This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since. We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic. I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on "more magic".
  • magnetocrystalline — (physics) Describing the interaction between the magnetization and the crystal structure of a material.
  • magnetogasdynamics — magnetohydrodynamics.
  • maternity hospital — birthing facility
  • metabolic syndrome — Pathology. a group of medical conditions present simultaneously in a patient, as high blood pressure, low HDL cholesterol levels, and an excess of abdominal fat, that increases a person's risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Also called insulin resistance syndrome.
  • microcrystallinity — The condition of being microcrystalline.
  • mobile data system — a system consisting of a client computer requesting information and a server supplying this information
  • monophosphorylated — (biochemistry) phosphorylated with a single unit of phosphoric acid.
  • mucopolysaccharide — (formerly) glycosaminoglycan.
  • muscular dystrophy — a hereditary disease characterized by gradual wasting of the muscles with replacement by scar tissue and fat, sometimes also affecting the heart.
  • music to your ears — If something that you hear is music to your ears, it makes you feel very happy.
  • mutual aid society — A mutual aid society is an organization that provides benefits or other help to its members when they are affected by things such as death, sickness, disability, old age, or unemployment.
  • neo-pythagoreanism — a philosophical system, established in Alexandria and Rome in the second century b.c., consisting mainly of revived Pythagorean doctrines with elements of Platonism and Stoicism.
  • neuropsychodynamic — Of or pertaining to neuropsychodynamics.
  • neutrino astronomy — the branch of astronomy dealing with the detection and measurement of neutrinos emitted by the sun and other celestial objects.
  • new storage system — (storage)   (NSS) A major Multics implementation project during the 1970s. The initial Multics file system design had evolved from the one-huge-disk world of CTSS. When multiple disk units were used they were just assigned increasing ranges of disk addresses, so a segment could have pages scattered over all disks on the system. This provided good I/O parallelism but made crash recovery expensive. NSS redesigned the lower levels of the file system, introducing the concepts of logical volume and physical volume and a mapping from a Multics directory branch to a VTOC entry for each file. The new system had much better recovery performance in exchange for a small space and performance cost.
  • normally aspirated — A normally aspirated or naturally aspirated engine breathes air at atmospheric pressure.
  • ovariohysterectomy — Surgical removal of the ovaries and uterus.
  • people's democracy — (in Communist ideology) a country or form of government in transition from bourgeois democracy to socialism. In this stage there is more than one class, the largest being the proletariat, led by the Communist Party, which is therefore the dominant power
  • phantasmagorically — having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination.
  • pigmy hippopotamus — a related but smaller animal, Choeropsis liberiensis
  • play cat and mouse — Also called cat and rat. a children's game in which players in a circle keep a player from moving into or out of the circle and permit a second player to move into or out of the circle to escape the pursuing first player.
  • play someone false — to deceive, cheat, hoodwink, or betray someone
  • postviral syndrome — debilitating condition occurring as a sequel to viral illness
  • potassium myronate — sinigrin.
  • prayer of manasses — a book of the Apocrypha.
  • processionary moth — a moth of the family Thaumetopoeidae, esp the oak processionary moth (Thaumetopoea processionea), the larvae of which leave the communal shelter nightly for food in a V-shaped procession
  • programme of study — the prescribed syllabus that pupils must be taught at each key stage in the National Curriculum
  • pseudo-symptomatic — pertaining to a symptom or symptoms.
  • psychogalvanometer — a type of galvanometer for detecting and measuring psychogalvanic currents.
  • psychopharmacology — the branch of pharmacology dealing with the psychological effects of drugs.
  • publishing company — a firm which publishes books
  • pulmonary embolism — the blockage of a pulmonary artery, often by a blood clot, that stops the flow of blood to the lungs and which can result in death if untreated
  • pygmy hippopotamus — a small hippopotamus, Choeropsis liberiensis, of forests and swamps in western Africa.
  • raman spectroscopy — a form of spectroscopy which uses the Raman effect for studying molecules
  • registered company — a company which has officially registered its business
  • respiratory system — the system by which oxygen is taken into the body and an exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide takes place; in mammals the system includes the nasal passages, pharynx, trachea, bronchi, and lungs.
  • restoration comedy — English comedy of the period of the Restoration, stressing manners and social satire.
  • rheims-douay bible — Douay Bible.
  • secondary consumer — (in the food chain) a carnivore that feeds only upon herbivores.
  • secondary emission — the emission of electrons (secondary electrons) from a material that is bombarded with electrons or ions.
  • semi-microanalysis — any analytical method in which the weight of the sample is between 10 and 100 milligrams.
  • september holidays — a period of time in September when people do not have to go to school, college or work
  • significant symbol — a verbal or nonverbal gesture, as a word or smile, that has acquired a conventionalized meaning.
  • slow-motion replay — a showing again in slow motion of a sequence of action, esp of part of a sporting contest immediately after it happens
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