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21-letter words containing s, e, a, m, n

  • marine superintendent — a person who is responsible for the maintenance of the vessels of a shipping line, for their docking and the handling of cargo, and for the hiring of personnel for deck departments.
  • mask read-only memory — (storage)   (MROM) A kind of ROM in which the memory contents are determined by one of the masks used to manufacture the integrated circuit. MROM can give high storage density (bits per millimeter squared) making it a cheap solution for high volume applications.
  • massage someone's ego — to boost someone's sense of self-esteem by flattery
  • mauna kea observatory — an astronomical observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, situated at an altitude of 13,600 feet (4145 meters).
  • mean square deviation — variance (def 3).
  • mechanical instrument — a musical instrument, such as a barrel organ or music box, that plays a preselected piece of music by mechanical means
  • mechanical solidarity — social cohesiveness that is based on shared activities, beliefs, and experiences and is characteristic of simple traditional societies.
  • mechanical suspension — the act of suspending.
  • medical jurisprudence — forensic medicine.
  • medium access control — Media Access Control
  • megaloblastic anaemia — any anaemia, esp pernicious anaemia, characterized by the presence of megaloblasts in the blood or bone marrow
  • mengistu haile mariam — born 1937, Ethiopian political leader: head of state 1977–87; president 1987–91.
  • meter-kilogram-second — of or relating to the system of units in which the meter, kilogram, and second are the principal units of length, mass, and time. Abbreviation: mks, MKS.
  • methylisothiazolinone — (chemistry) A powerful biocide and preservative within the group of isothiazolinones, used in shampoos etc.
  • metropolitan district — any of the districts making up the metropolitan counties of England: since 1986 they have functioned as unitary authorities, forming the sole principal tier of local government. Each metropolitan district has an elected council responsible for education, social services, etc
  • modern apprenticeship — an arrangement that allows a school leaver to gain vocational qualifications while being trained in a job
  • motherwell and wishaw — a burgh in the Motherwell district, in S Scotland.
  • motivational 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.
  • motor neurone disease — Motor neurone disease is a disease which destroys the part of a person's nervous system that controls movement.
  • multichannel analyser — an electronic instrument, such as a pulse height analyser, that splits an input waveform into a large number of channels in accordance with a particular parameter of the input
  • multiplex transmitter — a transmitter that sends signals by multiplex
  • munchausen's syndrome — a mental disorder in which a patient feigns illness to obtain hospital treatment
  • muon-catalysed fusion — an experimental form of nuclear fusion in which hydrogen and deuterium muonic atoms are formed. Because the mass of the muon is much larger than that of the electron, the atoms are smaller, and the nuclei are close enough for fusion to occur
  • negotiable instrument — order or promise to pay money
  • network administrator — (job)   A person who manages a communications network within an organisation. Responsibilities include network security, installing new applications, distributing software upgrades, monitoring daily activity, enforcing licensing agreements, developing a storage management program and providing for routine backups.
  • 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.
  • nominative of address — a noun naming the person to whom one is speaking.
  • nonexamination course — a course of study in which there are no examinations
  • northumberland strait — the part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence that separates Prince Edward Island from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in SE Canada. About 200 miles (320 km) long; 9–30 miles (15–48 km) wide.
  • notre-dame-des-vertus — an industrial suburb of Paris, on the Seine. Pop: 63 136 (1999)
  • oil-in-water emulsion — An oil-in-water emulsion is a mixture in which an oily medicine is dispersed in water or other liquid.
  • one-dimensional array — (types)   An array with only one dimension; the simplest kind of array, consisting of a sequence of items ("elements"), all of the same type. An element is selected by an integer index that normally starts at zero for the first element and increases by one. The index of the last element is thus the length of the array minus one. A one-dimensional array is also known as a vector. It should not be confused with a list. In some languages, e.g. Perl, all arrays are one-dimensional and higher dimensions are represented as arrays of pointers to arrays (which can have different sizes and can themselves contain pointers to arrays and so on). A one-dimensional array maps simply to memory: the address of an element with index i is A(i) = A0 + i * s where A0 is the base address of the array and s is the size of storage used for each element, the "stride". Elements may be padded to certain address boundaries, e.g. machine words, to increase access speed, in which case the stride will be larger than the amount of data in an element.
  • operational semantics — (theory)   A set of rules specifying how the state of an actual or hypothetical computer changes while executing a program. The overall state is typically divided into a number of components, e.g. stack, heap, registers etc. Each rule specifies certain preconditions on the contents of some components and their new contents after the application of the rule. It is similar in spirit to the notion of a Turing machine, in which actions are precisely described in a mathematical way. Compuare axiomatic semantics, denotational semantics.
  • pacific standard time — See under standard time.
  • pdp assembly language — (language)   (PAL) The assembly language for the PDP-8 and PDP-11.
  • peephole optimisation — (compiler)   A kind of low-level code optimisation that considers only a few adjacent machine code instructions at a time and looks for certain combinations which can be replaced with more efficient sequences. E.g. ADD R0, #1 ADD R0, #1 (add one to register R0) could be replaced by ADD R0, #2 as long as there were no jumps to the second instruction.
  • performance appraisal — the assessment, at regular intervals, of an employee's performance at work
  • personalized medicine — an approach to the practice of medicine that uses information about a patient’s unique genetic makeup and environment to customize the patient's medical care to fit his or her individual requirements.
  • pick someone's brains — to obtain information or ideas from someone
  • ploughman's spikenard — a European plant, Inula conyza, with tubular yellowish flower heads surrounded by purple bracts: family Asteraceae (composites)
  • poke borak at someone — to jeer at someone
  • polarizing microscope — a microscope that utilizes polarized light to reveal detail in an object, used especially to study crystalline and fibrous structures.
  • pomp and circumstance — ceremony
  • portable common loops — (PCL) A language which started out as an implementation of CommonLoops and turned into a portable CLOS implementation. Version 1992-08-28. It runs under Lucid Common LISP 4.0.1 and CMU Common LISP 16e.
  • portuguese man-of-war — any of several large, oceanic hydrozoans of the genus Physalia, having a large, bladderlike structure with a saillike crest by which they are buoyed up and from which dangle tentacles with stinging cells.
  • postpartum depression — Postpartum depression is a mental state involving feelings of anxiety and sudden mood swings which some women experience after they have given birth.
  • potassium bicarbonate — a white, crystalline, slightly alkaline, salty-tasting, water-soluble powder, KHCO 3 , produced by the passage of carbon dioxide through an aqueous potassium carbonate solution: used in cookery as a leavening agent and in medicine as an antacid.
  • potassium thiocyanate — a colorless, crystalline, hygroscopic, water-soluble solid, KSCN, used chiefly in the manufacture of chemicals, dyes, and drugs.
  • prader-willi syndrome — a congenital condition characterized by obsessive eating, obesity, learning difficulties, and small genitalia
  • premenstrual syndrome — a complex of physical and emotional changes, including depression, irritability, appetite changes, bloating and water retention, breast soreness, and changes in muscular coordination, one or more of which may be experienced in the several days before the onset of menstrual flow. Abbreviation: PMS.
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