19-letter words containing s, c, i
- miscellaneous items — various kinds of thing, esp small purchases
- mischaracterization — The act of characterizing something in an inaccurate or misleading way.
- missouri compromise — an act of Congress (1820) by which Missouri was admitted as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and slavery was prohibited in the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30′N, except for Missouri.
- missouri meerschaum — corncob (def 2).
- molecular biologist — a specialist in the study of biological phenomena at the molecular level
- moses-in-the-cradle — a plant, Rhoeo spathacea, native to the West Indies and Central America, having leaves with purple undersides and white flowers enclosed in a boat-shaped envelope formed by two bracts.
- motivation research — the application of the knowledge and techniques of the social sciences, especially psychology and sociology, to understanding consumer attitudes and behavior: used as a guide in advertising and marketing.
- mouse-ear chickweed — any of various similar and related plants of the genus Cerastium
- moving spirit/force — The moving spirit or moving force behind something is the person or thing that caused it to start and to keep going, or that influenced people to take part in it.
- mucopolysaccharides — Plural form of mucopolysaccharide.
- multiplication sign — Arithmetic. the symbol (⋅), (×), or (∗) between two mathematical expressions, denoting multiplication of the second expression by the first. In certain algebraic notations the sign is suppressed and multiplication is indicated by immediate juxtaposition or contiguity, as in ab.
- music to one's ears — something that is very pleasant to hear
- nagling coalescence — (networking, algorithm) An algorithm for improving TCP/IP network performance by combining small packets ("tinygrams") into larger ones, thus reducing the per-packet overhead. The server transmits the packet either when it has reached a preset size or when it receives an acknowledgment of the previous packet.
- narcotics anonymous — an organization that helps drug users recover from drug addiction
- nasty piece of work — malicious person
- national assistance — (in Britain) formerly a weekly allowance paid to certain people by the state to bring their incomes up to minimum levels established by law
- national characters — (character) Characters with accents and other diacritical marks that are used in certain written languages (that are based on the Roman alphabet) but not in others, particularly not in English. A standard list is ISO Latin 1.
- national serviceman — a soldier undertaking compulsory military service
- neats vs. scruffies — (artificial intelligence, jargon) The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in artificial intelligence research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; "neats" tend to try to build systems that "reason" in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while "scruffies" profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favour looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture "common sense" of living intelligences.
- necessary condition — prerequisite
- negative resistance — a characteristic of certain electronic components in which an increase in the applied voltage increases the resistance, producing a proportional decrease in current
- neuropsychodynamics — The theoretical synthesis of neuroscience and psychodynamics.
- new zealand spinach — a plant, Tetragonia tetragonioides, of warm regions, cultivated for its edible leaves, eaten as a vegetable.
- newtonian mechanics — the branch of mechanics that is based on Newton's laws of motion and that is applicable to systems that are so large that Planck's constant can be regarded as negligibly small (distinguished from quantum mechanics).
- newtonian telescope — a reflecting telescope in which a mirror or reflecting prism is mounted on the axis near the eyepiece so that the image may be viewed from outside the telescope tube at right angles to the axis.
- nicolaus copernicus — Nicolaus [nik-uh-ley-uh s] /ˌnɪk əˈleɪ əs/ (Show IPA), (Mikolaj Kopernik) 1473–1543, Polish astronomer who promulgated the now accepted theory that the earth and the other planets move around the sun (the Copernican System)
- night-scented stock — a plant, Matthiola bicornis, of the genus Matthiola, of the Mediterranean region, cultivated for its brightly coloured flowers: Brassicaceae (crucifers)
- no strings attached — without conditions
- northwest ordinance — the act of Congress in 1787 providing for the government of the Northwest Territory and setting forth the steps by which its subdivisions might become states.
- nuclear disarmament — the gradual reduction and eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons in the world
- object-oriented sql — (language) (OSQL) A functional language, a superset of SQL, used in Hewlett-Packard's OpenODB database system.
- oil-catalyst slurry — Oil-catalyst slurry is a heavy aromatic by-product of a refinery's fluid catalytic cracking unit, that forms a small part of global fuel oil supply.
- old church slavonic — the oldest attested Slavic language, an ecclesiastical language written first by Cyril and Methodius in a Bible translation of the 9th century and continued in use for about two centuries. It represents the South Slavic, Bulgarian dialect of 9th-century Salonika with considerable addition of other South and West Slavic elements. Abbreviation: OCS.
- old spanish customs — irregular practices among a group of workers to gain increased financial allowances, reduced working hours, etc
- olive-backed thrush — Swainson's thrush.
- on cue/as if on cue — If you say that something happened on cue or as if on cue, you mean that it happened just when it was expected to happen, or just at the right time.
- on no consideration — for no reason whatsoever; never
- on one's conscience — causing feelings of guilt or remorse
- open source license — (legal) Any document that attempts to specify open source usage and distribution of software. These licenses are usually drafted by experts and are likely to be more legally sound than one a programmer could write. However, loopholes do exist. Here is a non-exhaustive list of open source licenses: 1. Public Domain - No license. 2. BSD License - An early open source license 3. General Public License (GPL) - The copyleft license of the Free Software Foundation. Used for GNU software and much of Linux. 4. Artistic License Less restrictive than the GPL, permitted by Perl in addition to the GPL. 5. Mozilla Public Licenses. (MPL, MozPL) and Netscape Public License (NPL).
- operations director — a director or senior manager who oversees the efficiency of business operations
- operations research — the analysis, usually involving mathematical treatment, of a process, problem, or operation to determine its purpose and effectiveness and to gain maximum efficiency.
- optical double star — two stars that appear as one if not viewed through a telescope with adequate magnification, such as two stars that are separated by a great distance but are nearly in line with each other and an observer (optical double star) or those that are relatively close together and comprise a single physical system (physical double star)
- optimising compiler — (programming, tool) compiler which attempts to analyse the code it produces and to produce more efficient code by performing program transformation such as branch elimination, partial evaluation, or peep-hole optimisation. Contrast pessimising compiler.
- orthopaedic surgeon — a surgeon specializing in the branch of surgery concerned with disorders of the spine and joints and the repair of deformities of these parts
- orthopaedic surgery — surgery concerned with disorders of the spine and joints and the repair of deformities of these parts
- oscillating circuit — a circuit producing electrical oscillations.
- palisade parenchyma — the upper layer of ground tissue in a leaf, consisting of elongated cells beneath and perpendicular to the upper epidermis and constituting the primary area of photosynthesis.
- pancreatic fibrosis — cystic fibrosis.
- parachute spinnaker — a very large spinnaker used on a racing yacht.
- parallactic ellipse — the apparent ellipse, as seen against the background of more distant stars, described annually by a nearby star because of the earth's orbital motion around the sun. Compare parallax (def 2).