20-letter words containing s, e, r, o
- keep one's pecker up — If you tell someone to keep their pecker up, you are encouraging them to be cheerful in a difficult situation.
- keep your mouth shut — If you keep your mouth shut about something, you do not talk about it, especially because it is a secret.
- keratoconjunctivitis — inflammation of the cornea and conjunctiva.
- keyboard video mouse — (hardware) (KVM) Used to describe a "KVM switch" that allows one keyboard, one video display and one mouse to be switched between two or more computers.
- kick over the traces — either of the two straps, ropes, or chains by which a carriage, wagon, or the like is drawn by a harnessed horse or other draft animal.
- kluver-bucy syndrome — a syndrome caused by bilateral injury to the temporal lobes and characterized by memory defect, hypersexuality, excessive oral behavior, and diminished fear reactions.
- knights hospitallers — a military religious order founded about the time of the first crusade (1096–99) among European crusaders. It took its name from a hospital and hostel in Jerusalem
- know all the answers — be opinionated
- labour-saving device — a machine, gadget, etc, that reduces (human) effort, hard work or labour
- lampbrush chromosome — a chromosome with looped projections resembling a brush
- languedoc-roussillon — a region of S France, on the Gulf of Lions: consists of the departments of Lozère, Gard, Hérault, Aude, and Pyrénées-Orientales; mainly mountainous with a coastal plain
- laurentian mountains — a range of low mountains in E Canada, in Quebec between the St Lawrence River and Hudson Bay. Highest point: 1191 m (3905 ft)
- law of large numbers — the theorem in probability theory that the number of successes increases as the number of experiments increases and approximates the probability times the number of experiments for a large number of experiments.
- law of superposition — Geology. a basic law of geochronology, stating that in any undisturbed sequence of rocks deposited in layers, the youngest layer is on top and the oldest on bottom, each layer being younger than the one beneath it and older than the one above it.
- law-and-order issues — issues concerning law and social conventions
- least-squares method — a method of estimating values from a set of observations by minimizing the sum of the squares of the differences between the observations and the values to be found.
- legal representation — representation by a lawyer
- liberty of the press — freedom of the press.
- life-support machine — A life-support machine is the equipment that is used to keep a person alive when they are very ill and cannot breathe without help.
- light-weight process — (operating system, parallel) (LWP) A single-threaded sub-process which, unlike a thread, has its own process identifier and may also differ in its inheritance and controlling features. Several operating systems, e.g. SunOS 5.x, provide system calls for creating and controlling LWPs.
- like a house on fire — If two people get on like a house on fire, they quickly become close friends, for example because they have many interests in common.
- like a ton of bricks — (used esp of the manner of punishing or reprimanding someone) with great force; severely
- linearly ordered set — a set in which a relation, as “less than or equal to,” holds for all pairs of elements of the set.
- linguistic geography — dialect geography.
- liturgy of the hours — a revision (promulgated in 1970) of the arrangement and texts of the Divine Office
- live on one's nerves — If someone is living on their nerves, they are continually worried and anxious about the situation that they are in.
- lonely hearts column — the part of a newspaper or magazine where lonely hearts ads appear
- lost property office — room for mislaid objects
- lou gehrig's disease — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
- love's labour's lost — a comedy (1594–95?) by Shakespeare.
- lower yosemite falls — a section of Yosemite Falls in central California, in the Yosemite National Park, that is 98 m (320 ft) high
- loyal order of moose — See under moose (def 2).
- lump in one's throat — the passage from the mouth to the stomach or to the lungs, including the pharynx, esophagus, larynx, and trachea.
- lunisolar precession — the principal component of the precession of the equinoxes, produced by the gravitational attraction of the sun and the moon on the equatorial bulge of the earth.
- magical mystery tour — something exciting and mysterious; esp an exploration of a new place where somebody being shown or taken around does not know where exactly they will be going
- magnetohydrodynamics — the branch of physics that deals with the motion of electrically conductive fluids, especially plasmas, in magnetic fields. Abbreviation: MHD.
- mail transport agent — Message Transfer Agent
- make short shrift of — to dispose of quickly and unsympathetically
- malpighian corpuscle — Also called kidney corpuscle, Malpighian body. the structure at the beginning of a vertebrate nephron, consisting of a glomerulus and its surrounding Bowman's capsule.
- margaret of scotland — Saint. 1045–93, queen consort of Malcolm III of Scotland. Her piety and benefactions to the church led to her canonization (1250). Feast days: June 10, Nov 16
- mary, queen of scots — family name Stuart. 1542–87, queen of Scotland (1542–67); daughter of James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise. She was married to Francis II of France (1558–60), her cousin Lord Darnley (1565–67), and the Earl of Bothwell (1567–71), who was commonly regarded as Darnley's murderer. She was forced to abdicate in favour of her son (later James VI of Scotland) and fled to England. Imprisoned by Elizabeth I until 1587, she was beheaded for plotting against the English crown
- mass-energy equation — the equation, E=mc2, formulated by Albert Einstein, expressing the equivalence between mass and energy, where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the velocity of light.
- master of ceremonies — a person who directs the entertainment at a party, dinner, nightclub, radio or television broadcast, or the like, acting as host and introducing the speakers or performers. Abbreviation: M.C., MC.
- master of the revels — an English court official from the late 15th to early 18th centuries responsible to the Lord Chamberlain for overseeing and paying for court entertainments.
- measure one's length — to fall, lie, or be thrown down at full length
- media access control — (networking) (MAC) The lower sublayer of the OSI data link layer. The interface between a node's Logical Link Control and the network's physical layer. The MAC differs for various physical media. See also MAC Address, Ethernet, IEEE 802.3, token ring.
- megabytes per second — (unit) (MBps, MB/s) Millions of bytes per second. A unit of data rate. 1 MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes per second (not 1,048,576).
- megakaryocytopoiesis — (biology) The cellular development process that leads to platelet production.
- meissner's corpuscle — tactile corpuscle.
- membranous labyrinth — an intricate combination of paths or passages in which it is difficult to find one's way or to reach the exit. Synonyms: maze, network, web.