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22-letter words containing s, i, r, c

  • gravitational constant — constant of gravitation. See under law of gravitation.
  • greystone technologies — (company)   The producers of the GT/M MUMPS compiler and GT/SQL pre-processor for VAX and DEC Alpha.
  • gross domestic product — gross national product excluding payments on foreign investments. Abbreviation: GDP.
  • gross national product — the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced in a country during one year. Abbreviation: GNP.
  • guest services manager — A guest services manager at a hotel is responsible for the services and facilities that the hotel provides for its guests.
  • guided missile cruiser — a naval cruiser equipped with long-range guided missiles and missile launchers.
  • gulf of saint lawrence — a deep arm of the Atlantic off the E coast of Canada between Newfoundland and the mainland coasts of Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia
  • gum bichromate process — a contact printing method in which the image is formed on a coating of sensitized gum containing a suitable colored pigment and potassium or ammonium dichromate.
  • hans christian oersted — Hans Christian [hahns kris-tyahn] /hɑns ˈkrɪs tyɑn/ (Show IPA), 1777–1851, Danish physicist.
  • harvard classification — a classification of stars based on the characteristic spectral absorption lines and bands of the chemical elements present
  • hemorrhagic septicemia — an acute infectious disease of animals, caused by the bacterium Pasteurella multocida, and characterized by fever, catarrhal symptoms, pneumonia, and general blood infection.
  • historical linguistics — the study of changes in a language or group of languages over a period of time.
  • historical materialism — (in Marxist theory) the doctrine that all forms of social thought, as art or philosophy, and institutions, as the family or the state, develop as a superstructure founded on an economic base; that they reflect the character of economic relations and are altered or modified as a result of class struggles; that each ruling economic class produces the class that will destroy or replace it; and that dialectical necessity requires the eventual withering away of the state and the establishment of a classless society: the body of theory, in dialectical materialism, dealing with historical process and social causation.
  • horn-rimmed spectacles — spectacles with rims made of material resembling horn
  • host control interface — (hardware, wireless)   (HCI) A network layer in the Bluetooth Core Protocol Stack, lying between the software and the hardware stacks and serving as the interface through which the software controls two of Bluetooth's four core protocols.
  • hybrid multiprocessing — (parallel)   (HMP) The kind of multitasking which OS/2 supports. HMP provides some elements of symmetric multiprocessing, using add-on IBM software called MP/2. OS/2 SMP was planned for release in late 1993.
  • in one's own back yard — close at hand
  • indeterminate sentence — a penalty, imposed by a court, that has relatively wide limits or no limits, as one of imprisonment for one to ten years.
  • industrial archaeology — the study of past industrial machines, works, etc
  • industrialized country — a country characterized by industry on an extensive scale
  • inferential statistics — the branch of statistics dealing with conclusions, generalizations, predictions, and estimations based on data from samples.
  • information processing — processing of information, especially the handling of information by computers in accordance with strictly defined systems of procedure.
  • inland revenue service — In the United States, the Inland Revenue Service is the government authority which collects taxes. The abbreviation IRS is often used.
  • instruction scheduling — The compiler phase that orders instructions on a pipelined, superscalar, or VLIW architecture so as to maximise the number of function units operating in parallel and to minimise the time they spend waiting for each other. Examples are filling a delay slot; interspersing floating-point instructions with integer instructions to keep both units operating; making adjacent instructions independent, e.g. one which writes a register and another which reads from it; separating memory writes to avoid filling the write buffer. Norman P. Jouppi and David W. Wall, "Available Instruction-Level Parallelism for Superscalar and Superpipelined Processors", Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pp. 272--282, 1989.
  • interactive courseware — (ICW) A training program controlled by a computer that relies on trainee input to determine the order and pace of instruction delivery. The trainee advances through the sequence of instructional events by making decisions and selections. The instruction branches according to the trainee's responses. ICW is a US military term which includes computer-aided instruction and computer-based training.
  • interactive television — techniques that enable viewers to interact with what they are watching
  • interpretive semantics — a school of semantic theory based on the doctrine that the rules that relate sentences to their meanings form an autonomous system, separate from the rules that determine what is grammatical in a language
  • it's london to a brick — it is certain
  • jacquard, joseph-marie — Joseph-Marie Jacquard
  • java community process — (project)   (JCP) An organization controlled by Sun Microsystems to further the growth of the Java language and runtime. The JCP produces standards called Java Standard Requests, which are "requests" in the same sense as RFCs.
  • junior sales associate — A junior sales associate is an inexperienced member of the sales staff, usually receiving training or supervised by more experienced staff.
  • justification by works — the belief that a person becomes just before God by the performance of good works: the doctrine against which Luther protested in inaugurating the Protestant Reformation.
  • keesler air force base — a U.S. Air Force installation in S Mississippi, near Biloxi.
  • klebs-loffler bacillus — a bacterium, Corynebacterium diphtheriae, which causes diphtheria.
  • label switching router — (networking)   (LSR) A device that typically resides somewhere in the middle of a network and is capable of forwarding datagrams by label switching. In many cases, especially early versions of MPLS networks, a LSR will typically be a modified ATM switch that forwards datagrams based upon a label in the VPI/VCI field.
  • landscape architecture — the art of arranging or modifying the features of a landscape, an urban area, etc., for aesthetic or practical reasons.
  • leather-stocking tales — a series of historical novels by James Fenimore Cooper, comprising The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
  • lempel-ziv compression — Substitutional compression schemes proposed by Jakob Ziv and Abraham Lempel in 1977 and 1978. There are two main schemes, LZ77 and LZ78. Lempel-Ziv Welch compression is a variant of LZ78.
  • lesser prairie chicken — either of two North American gallinaceous birds of western prairies, Tympanuchus cupido (greater prairie chicken) or T. pallidicinctus (lesser prairie chicken) having rufous, brown, black, and white plumage.
  • lethargic encephalitis — sleeping sickness (def 2).
  • liquid crystal display — (hardware)   (LCD) An electro-optical device used to display digits, characters or images, commonly used in digital watches, calculators, and portable computers. The heart of the liquid crystal display is a piece of liquid crystal material placed between a pair of transparent electrodes. The liquid crystal changes the phase of the light passing through it and this phase change can be controlled by the voltage applied between the electrodes. If such a unit is placed between a pair of plane polariser plates then light can pass through it only if the correct voltage is applied. Liquid crystal displays are formed by integrating a number of such cells, or more usually, by using a single liquid crystal plate and a pattern of electrodes. The simplest kind of liquid crystal displays, those used in digital watches and calculators, contain a common electrode plane covering one side and a pattern of electrodes on the other. These electrodes can be individually controlled to produce the appropriate display. Computer displays, however, require far too many pixels (typically between 50,000 and several millions) to make this scheme, in particular its wiring, feasible. The electrodes are therefore replaced by a number of row electrodes on one side and column electrodes on the other. By applying voltage to one row and several columns the pixels at the intersections are set. The pixels being set one row after the other, in passive matrix displays the number of rows is limited by the ratio of the setting and fading times. In the setup described above (known as "twisted nematic") the number of rows is limited to about 20. Using an alternative "supertwisted nematic" setup VGA quality displays (480 rows) can be easily built. As of 1995 most notebook computers used this technique. Fading can be slowed by putting an active element, such as a transistor, on the top of each pixel. This "remembers" the setting of that pixel. These active matrix displays are of much better quality (as good as CRTs) but are much more expensive than the passive matrix displays. LCDs are slimmer, lighter and consume less power than the previous dominant display type, the cathode ray tube, hence their importance for portable computers.
  • lord high commissioner — the Queen's representative
  • lord justice of appeal — an ordinary judge of the Court of Appeal
  • lunar excursion module — lunar module. Abbreviation: LEM.
  • magnetic pole strength — Electricity. a measure of the force exerted by one face of a magnet on a face of another magnet when both magnets are represented by equal and opposite poles. Symbol: m.
  • manufacturing industry — the industry of manufacturing goods from raw materials
  • master warrant officer — a noncommissioned officer in the Canadian forces junior to a chief warrant officer
  • maxwell air force base — U.S. Air Force installation in SE central Alabama, NW of Montgomery: site of U.S. Air Force Advanced School.
  • mcculloch-pitts neuron — (artificial intelligence)   The basic building block of artificial neural networks. It receives one or more inputs and produces one or more identical outputs, each of which is a simple non-linear function of the sum of the inputs to the neuron. The non-linear function is typically a threshhold or step function which is usually smoothed (i.e. a sigmoid) to facilitate learning.
  • metasyntactic variable — (grammar)   Strictly, a variable used in metasyntax, but often used for any name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The word foo is the canonical example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use "foo" or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a metasyntactic-variable name is a scratch file that may be deleted at any time. To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a cultural signature. They occur both in series (used for related groups of variables or objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures: bazola, ztesch: Stanford (from mid-'70s on). zxc, spqr, wombat: Cambridge University (England). shme: Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/. blarg, wibble: New Zealand Of all these, only "foo" and "bar" are universal (and baz nearly so). The compounds foobar and "foobaz" also enjoy very wide currency. Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; barf and mumble, for example. See also Commonwealth Hackish for discussion of numerous metasyntactic variables found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.
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