21-letter words containing s, a, n, g, h, t
- japanese stranglehold — a wrestling hold in which an opponent's wrists are pulled to cross his or her arms in front of his or her own neck and exert pressure on the windpipe
- joseph bonaparte gulf — an inlet of the Timor Sea in N Australia. Width: 360 km (225 miles)
- knights of st columba — an international, semi-secret fraternal and charitable order for Catholic laymen, which originated in New Haven, Connecticut in 1882 (the Knights of Columbus)
- lactate dehydrogenase — an enzyme that catalyzes the interconversion of pyruvate and lactate, an important step in carbohydrate metabolism: elevated serum levels indicate injury to kidney, skeletal muscle, or heart muscle. Abbreviation: LDH.
- majority shareholding — a holding of more than half a company's shares
- mengistu haile mariam — born 1937, Ethiopian political leader: head of state 1977–87; president 1987–91.
- night storage heating — a system of heating which uses a heater or radiator that stores heat at night-time because electricity is cheaper
- nightmare file system — Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher spl level). Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the entire network of machines is frozen - worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great misfeature). ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s. See also broadcast storm.
- north east new guinea — the NE part of the former Australian Territory of New Guinea; now part of Papua New Guinea.
- otorhinolaryngologist — (medicine) Doctor specializing in otorhinolaryngology, the study of ear, nose, and throat.
- path coverage testing — (testing) Testing a program by examining which lines of executable code are visited (as in code coverage testing) and also the ways of getting to each line of code and the subsequent sequence of execution. Path coverage testing is the most comprehensive type of testing that a test suite can provide. It can find more bugs, especially those that are caused by data coupling. However, path coverage is hard and usually only used for small and/or critical sections of code.
- physical anthropology — the branch of anthropology dealing with the evolutionary changes in human anatomy and physiology, using mensurational and descriptive techniques.
- profit-sharing scheme — a scheme employing profit-sharing; a system in which a portion of the net profit of a business is distributed to its employees, usually in proportion to their wages or their length of service
- psychomotor agitation — agitation (def 3).
- psychomotor-agitation — the act or process of agitating; state of being agitated: She left in great agitation.
- pulse height analyser — a multichannel analyser that sorts pulses into selected amplitude ranges
- pulse height analyzer — an instrument that records or counts an electrical pulse if its amplitude falls within specified limits: used in nuclear physics research for the determination of energy spectra of nuclear radiations
- purchasing department — the group of staff within an organization that is responsible for buying goods or products
- rayleigh distribution — (mathematics) A curve that yields a good approximation to the actual labour curves on software projects.
- reconnaissance flight — a flight made by an aircraft in order to obtain military information about a particular place
- ring-around-the-rosey — a children's game in which the players sing while going around in a circle and squat when the lyrics “all fall down” are sung.
- rolling in the aisles — (of an audience) overcome with laughter
- rutherford scattering — the scattering of an alpha particle through a large angle with respect to the original direction of motion of the particle, caused by an atom (Rutherford atom) with most of the mass and all of the positive electric charge concentrated at a center or nucleus.
- safe in the knowledge — If you do something safe in the knowledge that something else is the case, you do the first thing confidently because you are sure of the second thing.
- sail against the wind — to sail a course that slants slightly away from the true direction of the wind; sail closehauled
- salam-weinberg theory — the electroweak theory.
- satisficing behaviour — the form of behaviour demonstrated by firms who seek satisfactory profits and satisfactory growth rather than maximum profits
- schlieren photography — a type of photography which records schlieren
- seeing/hearing things — If you say that someone is seeing or hearing things, you mean that they believe they are seeing or hearing something that is not really there.
- siamese fighting fish — a labyrinth fish, Betta splendens, that has been bred for centuries to develop brilliant coloration, very long fins, and pugnacity.
- single spanish burton — a tackle having a runner as well as the fall supporting the load, giving a mechanical advantage of three, neglecting friction.
- social anthropologist — an anthropologist who deals with cultural and social phenomena such as kinship systems or beliefs, esp of nonliterate peoples
- sovereign wealth fund — an investment fund created using the financial assets of a national government
- swim against the tide — to resist prevailing opinion
- the acting profession — actors considered as a group
- the shipping forecast — a radio broadcast made by the BBC of weather reports and forecasts for the seas around the British Isles
- to change the subject — When someone involved in a conversation changes the subject, they start talking about something else, often because the previous subject was embarrassing.
- to have green fingers — If someone has green fingers, they are very good at gardening and their plants grow well.
- to lay something bare — If you lay something bare, you uncover it completely so that it can then be seen.
- washington's birthday — February 22, formerly observed as a legal holiday in most states of the U.S. in honor of the birth of George Washington.
- weinberg-salam theory — electroweak theory.
- what price something? — what are the chances of something happening now?
- whistling in the dark — If you say that someone is whistling in the dark, you mean that they are trying to remain brave and convince themselves that the situation is not as bad as it seems.
- youth training scheme — (formerly, in Britain) a scheme, run by the Training Agency, to provide vocational training for unemployed 16–17-year-olds