0%

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

  • islamic fundamentalism — the belief or advocating of a conservative adherence to literal or traditional interpretations of the Qu'ran and the Sunnah
  • isthmus of tehuantepec — the narrowest part of S Mexico, with the Bay of Campeche on the north coast and the Gulf of Tehuantepec (an inlet of the Pacific) on the south coast
  • 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.
  • last call optimisation — (programming)   (Or "tail call optimisation") Discarding the immediate calling context (call stack frame) when the last action of a function or procedure, A, is to call another function or procedure, B. B will then return directly to A's caller, or possibly further up the call stack if the optimisation has been applied to several consecutive calls. Last call optimisation allows arbitrarily deep nesting of procedure calls without consuming memory to store useless environments. This is particularly useful in the special case of tail recursion optimisation, where a procedure's last action is to call itself (possibly indirectly).
  • limited access highway — expressway
  • 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.
  • make a clean breast of — Anatomy, Zoology. (in bipeds) the outer, front part of the thorax, or the front part of the body from the neck to the abdomen; chest.
  • make a federal case of — a matter that falls within the jurisdiction of a federal court or a federal law-enforcement agency.
  • make allowances for sb — If you make allowances for someone, you accept behaviour which you would not normally accept or deal with them less severely than you would normally, because of a problem that they have.
  • make common cause with — join forces
  • make contact (with sb) — If you make contact with someone, you find out where they are and talk or write to them.
  • make one's flesh creep — to move slowly with the body close to the ground, as a reptile or an insect, or a person on hands and knees.
  • management consultancy — a company of professionals who are employed to help an organization improve efficiency and performance
  • manuel estrada cabrera — Manuel [mah-nwel] /mɑˈnwɛl/ (Show IPA), 1857–1924, Guatemalan politician: president 1898–1920.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • microwave spectroscopy — the determination of those frequencies of the microwave spectrum that are selectively absorbed by certain materials, providing information about atomic, molecular, and crystalline structure.
  • middle atlantic states — the states of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey
  • middle-distance runner — someone who runs races of a length between the sprints and the distance events, esp the 800 metres and the 1500 metres
  • miscarriage of justice — law: wrongful judgement
  • miscellaneous expenses — small expenses of various kinds
  • molecular distillation — a vacuum distillation in which the molecules of the distillate reach the condenser before colliding with one another.
  • most significant digit — the digit farthest to the left in a number. Abbreviation: MSD.
  • mother carey's chicken — any of various small petrels, especially the stormy petrel, Oceanites oceanicus.
  • mozilla public license — Open source license
  • multiplicative inverse — reciprocal (def 9).
  • name service switching — Domain Name System
  • national semiconductor — (company)   A semiconductor manufacturer, responsible for the SC/MP, National Semiconductor 16000 and National Semiconductor 32000 series of microprocessors.
  • no room to swing a cat — If you say 'There's no room to swing a cat' or 'You can't swing a cat', you mean that the place you are talking about is very small or crowded.
  • nodal switching system — (NSS) Main routing nodes in the NSFnet backbone.
  • nominal semidestructor — (abuse)   Slang for "National Semiconductor", found among other places in the 4.3BSD networking sources. During the late 1970s to mid-1980s this company marketed a series of microprocessors including the National Semiconductor 16000 and National Semiconductor 32000. At one point early in the great microprocessor race, the specs on these chips made them look like serious competition for the rising Intel 80x86 and Motorola 680x0 series. Unfortunately, the actual parts were notoriously flaky and never implemented the full instruction set promised in their literature, apparently because the company couldn't get any of the mask steppings to work as designed. They eventually sank without trace, joining the Zilog Z8000 and a few even more obscure also-rans in the graveyard of forgotten microprocessors.
  • oak processionary moth — a moth, (Thaumetopoea processionea), of the family Thaumetopoeidae, the larvae of which leave the communal shelter nightly for food in a V-shaped procession
  • ocean marine insurance — insurance covering risks involving the transporting of persons or goods on the high seas.
  • on someone's coattails — the back of the skirt on a man's coat or jacket.
  • overstay one's welcome — to stay (at a party, on a visit, etc), longer than pleases the host or hostess
  • paracoccidioidomycosis — a chronic infection caused by the fungus Paracoccidioides brasiliensis, occurring in Mexico and in Central and South America, characterized by mouth and throat ulcers, weight loss, and lesions on the skin, intestines, and genitals.
  • paroxysmal tachycardia — tachycardia that begins and subsides suddenly.
  • percussive maintenance — (jargon)   The fine art of whacking a device to get it working, possibly using a fine adjuster.
  • pneumocystis pneumonia — a pulmonary infection caused by the protozoan Pneumocystis carinii, occurring as an opportunistic disease in persons with impaired immune systems, as AIDS victims. Abbreviation: PCP.
  • poor richard's almanac — an almanac (1732–58) written and published by Benjamin Franklin.
  • post office department — former name of United States Postal Service.
  • potassium ferricyanide — a bright-red, crystalline, water-soluble, poisonous solid, K 3 Fe(CN) 6 , used chiefly in the manufacture of pigments, as Prussian blue, and of paper, especially blueprint paper.
  • potassium ferrocyanide — a lemon-yellow, crystalline, water-soluble solid, K 4 Fe(CN) 6 ⋅3H 2 O, used chiefly in casehardening alloys having an iron base and in dyeing wool and silk.
  • practice makes perfect — If you say 'practice makes perfect', you mean that it is possible to learn something or develop a skill if you practise enough. People often say this to encourage someone to keep practising.
  • process cinematography — cinematography in which the main or foreground action or scene is superimposed on or combined with simulated or separately filmed background action or scenery to produce special visual effects.
  • programmed instruction — a progressively monitored, step-by-step teaching method, employing small units of information or learning material and frequent testing, whereby the student must complete or pass one stage before moving on to the next.
Was this page helpful?
Yes No
Thank you for your feedback! Tell your friends about this page
Tell us why?