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18-letter words containing s, c, r, o

  • in terrorem clause — a clause in a will stating that a beneficiary who contests the will shall lose his or her legacy.
  • incommensurability — not commensurable; having no common basis, measure, or standard of comparison.
  • inconsiderableness — Quality of being inconsiderable.
  • indirect discourse — discourse consisting not of an exact quotation of a speaker's words but of a version transformed from them for grammatical inclusion in a larger sentence. He said he was hungry is an example of indirect discourse.
  • inspector of taxes — an official of HMRC whose work is to assess individuals' income tax liability
  • instruction manual — how-to, usage guide
  • intelligence corps — a military department that gathers and analyzes information
  • intercartilaginous — (anatomy) Within cartilage.
  • interconnectedness — the quality or condition of being interconnected; interrelatedness: the interconnectedness of all nations working toward world peace.
  • internal secretion — a secretion, esp a hormone, that is absorbed directly into the blood
  • involuntary muscle — muscle: contracts involuntarily
  • irreconcilableness — The quality of being irreconcilable; irreconcilability; incompatibility; incongruity.
  • irreproachableness — The quality or state of being irreproachable; integrity; innocence.
  • isabella of france — 1292–1358, wife (1308–27) of Edward II of England, whom, aided by her lover, Roger de Mortimer, she deposed; mother of Edward III
  • isometric exercise — exercise or a program of exercises to strengthen specific muscles or shape the figure by pitting one muscle or part of the body against another or against an immovable object in a strong but motionless action, as by pressing the fist of one hand against the palm of the other or against a desk.
  • isometric joystick — (hardware)   Any kind of joystick where the input depends on the force exerted rather than the position of the control, e.g. TrackPoint.
  • isothermal process — a process that takes place without change in temperature.
  • isthmus of corinth — a narrow strip of land between the Gulf of Corinth and the Saronic Gulf: crossed by the Corinth Canal making navigation possible between the gulfs
  • italian corn salad — a southern European plant, Valerianella eriocarpa, of the valerian family, having edible, spoon-shaped, hairy leaves and dense clusters of pale-blue flowers.
  • jack of all trades — a person who is adept at many different kinds of work.
  • jack-of-all-trades — a person who is adept at many different kinds of work.
  • japanese artichoke — Chinese artichoke.
  • john birch society — an ultraconservative organization, founded in December 1958 by Robert Welch, Jr., chiefly to combat alleged Communist activities in the U.S.
  • junior high school — a school attended after elementary school and usually consisting of grades seven through nine.
  • knotted cranesbill — a British wildflower, Geranium nodosum, an meadow geranium with bright pink or purple flowers
  • krause's corpuscle — any of numerous encapsulated nerve endings occurring in the skin and mucous membranes, functioning as sensory cold receptors.
  • lactose intolerant — cannot digest milk
  • lambda abstraction — A term in lambda-calculus denoting a function. A lambda abstraction begins with a lower-case lambda (represented as "\" in this document), followed by a variable name (the "bound variable"), a full stop and a lambda expression (the body). The body is taken to extend as far to the right as possible so, for example an expression, \ x . \ y . x+y is read as \ x . (\ y . x+y). A nested abstraction such as this is often abbreviated to: \ x y . x + y The lambda expression (\ v . E) denotes a function which takes an argument and returns the term E with all free occurrences of v replaced by the actual argument. Application is represented by juxtaposition so (\ x . x) 42 represents the identity function applied to the constant 42. A lambda abstraction in Lisp is written as the symbol lambda, a list of zero or more variable names and a list of zero or more terms, e.g. (lambda (x y) (plus x y)) Lambda expressions in Haskell are written as a backslash, "\", one or more patterns (e.g. variable names), "->" and an expression, e.g. \ x -> x.
  • lenticular process — a method for producing images with a three-dimensional effect by photographing on lenticulated film.
  • lincoln's birthday — February 12, a legal holiday in some states of the U.S., in honor of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.
  • lipopolysaccharide — any of a class of polysaccharides to which lipids are attached.
  • liqueur chocolates — chocolates containing liqueur
  • list comprehension — (functional programming)   An expression in a functional language denoting the results of some operation on (selected) elements of one or more lists. An example in Haskell: This returns all pairs of numbers (x,y) where x and y are elements of the list 1, 2, ..., 10, y <= x and their sum is less than 10. A list comprehension is simply "syntactic sugar" for a combination of applications of the functions, concat, map and filter. For instance the above example could be written: The term "list comprehension" appears in the references below. The earliest reference to the notation is in Rod Burstall and John Darlington's description of their language, NPL. David Turner subsequently adopted this notation in his languages SASL, KRC and Miranda, where he has called them "ZF expressions", set abstractions and list abstractions (in his 1985 FPCA paper [Miranda: A Non-Strict Functional Language with Polymorphic Types]).
  • lithostratigraphic — Of or pertaining to lithostratigraphy.
  • locked-in syndrome — a condition in which a person is conscious but unable to move any part of the body except the eyes: results from damage to the brainstem
  • logarithmic spiral — log r = aθ
  • lonely hearts club — a club for people who are trying to find a lover or a friend
  • long-hours culture — The long-hours culture is the way in which some workers feel that they are expected to work much longer hours than they are paid to do.
  • long-stay car park — a car park (eg at an airport) where cars can be left for a long time
  • lord chief justice — the presiding judge of Britain's High Court of Justice, the superior court of record for both criminal and civil cases.
  • loschmidt's number — the number of molecules in one cubic centimeter of an ideal gas at standard temperature and pressure, equal to 2.687 × 10 19.
  • louisiana purchase — a treaty signed with France in 1803 by which the U.S. purchased for $15,000,000 the land extending from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
  • macro preprocessor — preprocessor
  • macroinvertebrates — Plural form of macroinvertebrate.
  • 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".
  • magistrate's court — a court having limited jurisdiction over minor civil and criminal matters, as matters of contract not exceeding a particular amount of money.
  • magistrates' court — law: handles minor crimes
  • magnetic resonance — the response by atoms, molecules, or nuclei subjected to a magnetic field to radio waves or other forms of energy: used in medicine for scanning
  • magnetocrystalline — (physics) Describing the interaction between the magnetization and the crystal structure of a material.
  • manufactured goods — products made by machine
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