18-letter words containing s, h, a, i, t
- iron (ii) sulphate — an iron salt with a saline taste, usually obtained as greenish crystals of the heptahydrate, which are converted to the white monohydrate above 100°C: used in inks, tanning, water purification, and in the treatment of anaemia. Formula: FeSO4
- isolation hospital — a hospital used to isolate or quarantine people with a contagious disease
- isothermal process — a process that takes place without change in temperature.
- japanese artichoke — Chinese artichoke.
- king of the castle — most powerful figure
- king-of-the-salmon — a ribbonfish, Trachypterus altivelis, of northern parts of the Pacific Ocean.
- kitchen-sink drama — a type of drama of the 1950s depicting the sordid aspects of domestic reality
- knights of pythias — a fraternal order founded in Washington, D.C., in 1864.
- legislative branch — the branch of government having the power to make laws; the legislature.
- lesser whitethroat — an Old World warbler, Sylvia curruca, having a greyish-brown plumage with a white throat and underparts
- light displacement — the weight of a ship with all its permanent equipment, excluding the weight of cargo, persons, ballast, dunnage, and fuel, but usually including the weight of permanent ballast and water used to operate steam machinery.
- lightning arrester — a device for preventing damage to radio, telephonic, or other electric equipment from lightning or other high-voltage currents, using spark gaps to carry the current to the ground without passing through the device.
- lincoln's birthday — February 12, a legal holiday in some states of the U.S., in honor of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.
- liqueur chocolates — chocolates containing liqueur
- literae humaniores — (at Oxford University) the faculty concerned with Greek and Latin literature, ancient history, and philosophy; classics
- lithostratigraphic — Of or pertaining to lithostratigraphy.
- logarithmic spiral — log r = aθ
- logarithmus dualis — (mathematics) (ld) Latin for logarithm base two. More commonly written as "log" with a subscript "2". Roughly the number of bits required to represent an integer.
- logical shift left — logical shift
- 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".
- malpighian tubules — one of a group of long, slender excretory tubules at the anterior end of the hindgut in insects and other terrestrial arthropods.
- manchester terrier — one of a breed of slender terriers having a short, glossy, black-and-tan coat, raised originally in Manchester, England.
- manhattan district — (during World War II) the code name for a unit of US army engineers established in 1942 to construct secret sites for the development of the atomic bomb
- marketing research — the study of influences upon customer and consumer behaviour and the analysis of market characteristics and trends
- materials handling — the loading, unloading, and movement of goods, as within a factory or warehouse, especially by the aid of mechanical devices.
- maternity hospital — birthing facility
- matthias schleiden — Matthias Jakob [mah-tee-ahs yah-kawp] /mɑˈti ɑs ˈyɑ kɔp/ (Show IPA), 1804–81, German botanist.
- mechanical testing — Mechanical testing is the testing of a material to find out its mechanical properties, for example its yield strength or hardness.
- median lethal dose — the quantity of a lethal substance, as a poison or pathogen, or of ionizing radiation that will kill 50 percent of the organisms subjected to it in a specified time period. Symbol: LD 5 0.
- menthol cigarettes — cigarettes that are flavoured with menthol
- metamorphic facies — Geology. a group of metamorphic rock units characterized by particular mineralogic associations.
- methacrylate resin — an acrylic resin formed by polymerizing the esters or amides of methacrylic acid.
- methylated spirits — ethyl alcohol denatured with methyl alcohol for the purpose of preventing its use as an alcoholic beverage.
- microsoft exchange — (messaging) Microsoft's messaging and enterprise collaboration server. Exchange's primary role is as an electronic mail message store but it can also store calendars, task lists, contact details, and other data.
- miniature pinscher — one of a German breed of toy dogs resembling a smaller version of the Doberman pinscher, having a flat skull, a smooth coat, erect ears, and a docked tail, bred originally as a watchdog.
- minister of health — a person appointed to head the government department of health
- moccasin telegraph — the transmission of rumour or secret information; the grapevine
- mount saint helens — a city in Merseyside, in NW England, near Liverpool.
- natural philosophy — natural science.
- nebular hypothesis — the theory that the solar system evolved from a mass of nebular matter: prominent in the 19th century following its precise formulation by Laplace.
- negative cash flow — the situation when income is less than payments
- neo-pythagoreanism — a philosophical system, established in Alexandria and Rome in the second century b.c., consisting mainly of revived Pythagorean doctrines with elements of Platonism and Stoicism.
- nervous exhaustion — extreme mental and physical fatigue caused by excessive emotional stress; neurasthenia.
- netherlands guiana — a former name of Suriname.
- nightmare scenario — If you describe a situation or event as a nightmare scenario, you mean that it is the worst possible thing that could happen.
- nike of samothrace — a Greek marble statue (c200 b.c.) of Nike found at Samothrace and now in the Louvre, Paris.
- non-characteristic — Also, characteristical. pertaining to, constituting, or indicating the character or peculiar quality of a person or thing; typical; distinctive: Red and gold are the characteristic colors of autumn.
- northeast corridor — the long, narrow strip of land between Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C., containing many adjacent urban areas.
- not a pretty sight — If you say that someone or something is not a pretty sight, you mean that it is not pleasant to look at.
- offset lithography — offset (def 6).