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20-letter words containing s, m, a, c

  • distress merchandise — goods sold below the prevailing price in order to raise cash quickly or to meet some other financial emergency.
  • district of columbia — a federal area in the E United States, on the Potomac, coextensive with the federal capital, Washington. 69 sq. mi. (179 sq. km). Abbreviation: DC (for use with zip code), D.C.
  • do someone a service — If you do someone a service, you do something that helps or benefits them.
  • domestic heating oil — a liquid petroleum product used to fuel residential building furnaces or boilers
  • drum and bugle corps — a marching band of drum players and buglers.
  • economic rationalism — an economic policy based on the efficiency of market forces, characterized by minimal government intervention, tax cuts, privatization, and deregulation of labour markets
  • electrohydrodynamics — (physics) the study of the dynamics of electrically conducting fluid.
  • employee association — an organization, other than a trade union, whose members comprise employees of a single employing organization. The aims of the association may be social, recreational, or professional
  • equilibrium constant — The equilibrium constant is the ratio between the amount of reactants and the amount of product for a particular chemical reaction, used to calculate chemical behavior.
  • erythema infectiosum — a mild infectious disease of childhood, caused by a virus, characterized by fever and a red rash spreading from the cheeks to the limbs and trunk
  • essential amino acid — an amino acid that cannot be synthesized in the body and is thus an essential component of the diet
  • essential complexity — (programming)   A measure of the "structuredness" of a program.
  • explicit parallelism — A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which allows or forces the programmer to annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks. This is obviously more work for the programmer than a system with implicit parallelism (where the system decides automatically which parts to run in parallel) but may allow higher performance.
  • financial instrument — A financial instrument is a document or contract that can be traded in a market, that represents an asset to one party and a liability or equity to the other.
  • financial statements — Financial statements are all of the reports that show how a company is performing for a certain period.
  • finite state machine — (mathematics, algorithm, theory)   (FSM or "Finite State Automaton", "transducer") An abstract machine consisting of a set of states (including the initial state), a set of input events, a set of output events, and a state transition function. The function takes the current state and an input event and returns the new set of output events and the next state. Some states may be designated as "terminal states". The state machine can also be viewed as a function which maps an ordered sequence of input events into a corresponding sequence of (sets of) output events. A deterministic FSM (DFA) is one where the next state is uniquely determinied by a single input event. The next state of a nondeterministic FSM (NFA) depends not only on the current input event, but also on an arbitrary number of subsequent input events. Until these subsequent events occur it is not possible to determine which state the machine is in. It is possible to automatically translate any nondeterministic FSM into a deterministic one which will produce the same output given the same input. Each state in the DFA represents the set of states the NFA might be in at a given time. In a probabilistic FSM [proper name?], there is a predetermined probability of each next state given the current state and input (compare Markov chain). The terms "acceptor" and "transducer" are used particularly in language theory where automata are often considered as abstract machines capable of recognising a language (certain sequences of input events). An acceptor has a single Boolean output and accepts or rejects the input sequence by outputting true or false respectively, whereas a transducer translates the input into a sequence of output events. FSMs are used in computability theory and in some practical applications such as regular expressions and digital logic design. See also state transition diagram, Turing Machine.
  • firearms certificate — a certificate that entitles the holder to own and keep a firearm
  • first earl of cromer — 1st Earl of, Evelyn Baring.
  • first-cause argument — an argument for the existence of God, asserting the necessity of an uncaused cause of all subsequent series of causes, on the assumption that an infinite regress is impossible.
  • flame-fusion process — Verneuil process.
  • force someone's hand — to force someone to act
  • frame check sequence — (communications)   (FCS) The extra characters added to a frame for error detection and correction(?). FCS is used in X.25, HDLC, Frame Relay, and other data link layer protocols.
  • fuming sulfuric acid — an oily, hygroscopic, corrosive liquid, H 2 S 2 O 7 , that, depending on purity, is colorless or dark brown: used chiefly as a dehydrating agent in the manufacture of explosives and as a sulfating or sulfonating agent in the manufacture of dyes.
  • fundamental constant — a physical constant, such as the gravitational constant or speed of light, that plays a fundamental role in physics and chemistry and usually has an accurately known value
  • fundamental research — research carried out to deepen understanding of the fundamental or basic principles of something
  • fundamental sequence — an infinite sequence, x 1 , x 2 , …, whose terms are points in Ek, in which there exists a point y such that the limit as n goes to infinity of xn = y if and only if for every ε>0, there exists a number N such that i > N and j > N implies | xi − xj |< ε. Also called Cauchy sequence, convergent sequence. Compare complete (def 10b).
  • generative semantics — a theory of generative grammar holding that the deep structure of a sentence is equivalent to its semantic representation, from which the surface structure can then be derived using only one set of rules that relate underlying meaning and surface form rather than separate sets of semantic and syntactic rules.
  • geological timescale — any division of geological time into chronological units, whether relative (with units in the correct temporal sequence) or absolute (with numerical ages attached)
  • glucosamine sulphate — a compound used in some herbal remedies and dietary supplements, esp to strengthen joint cartilage
  • gravimetric analysis — analysis by weight.
  • harmonic minor scale — minor scale (def 1).
  • harmonic progression — a series of numbers the reciprocals of which are in arithmetic progression.
  • hire-purchase system — a system of payment for a commodity in regular installments while using it.
  • honeysuckle ornament — anthemion.
  • hudson's bay company — a company chartered in England in 1670 to carry on fur trading with the Indians in North America.
  • hyperadrenocorticism — Cushing's syndrome.
  • hypercholesterolemia — the presence of an excessive amount of cholesterol in the blood.
  • hyperhomocysteinemia — (medicine) The presence of an excessive amount of homocysteine in the blood.
  • implicit parallelism — (parallel)   A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which decides automatically which parts to run in parallel. The best way of providing implicit parallelism is still (1995) an active research topic. The problem is to generate the right number of parallel tasks of the right size (or "granularity"). Too many tasks and the system gets bogged down in house-keeping, or memory for waiting tasks runs out, too few tasks and processors are left idle. The best performance is usually achieved with explicit parallelism where the programmer can annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks.
  • in bad circumstances — (of a person) in a bad financial situation
  • in the circumstances — a condition, detail, part, or attribute, with respect to time, place, manner,agent, etc., that accompanies, determines, or modifies a fact or event; a modifying or influencing factor: Do not judge his behavior without considering every circumstance.
  • income tax inspector — a person whose job is to assess individuals' income tax liability
  • incremental analysis — (testing)   Partial analysis of an incomplete product to allow early feedback on its development.
  • industrial democracy — control of an organization by the people who work for it, esp by workers holding positions on its board of directors
  • insulin-coma therapy — a former treatment for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, employing insulin-induced hypoglycemia as a method for producing convulsive seizures.
  • intercalary meristem — meristem in the internode of a stem.
  • intermediate section — The intermediate section is the section of the borehole after the top hole, which has more consolidated rock.
  • james prescott joule — James Prescott, 1818–89, English physicist.
  • java message service — (programming, messaging)   (JMS) An API for accessing enterprise messaging systems from Java programs. Java Message Service, part of the J2EE suite, provides standard APIs that Java developers can use to access the common features of enterprise message systems. JMS supports the publish/subscribe and point-to-point models and allows the creation of message types consisting of arbitrary Java objects. JMS provides support for administration, security, error handling, and recovery, optimisation, distributed transactions, message ordering, message acknowledgment, and more.
  • jerk someone's chain — to tease, mislead, or harass someone
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