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22-letter words containing s, p, i

  • 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.
  • gross written premiums — Gross written premiums are the total revenue from a contract expected to be received by an insurer before deductions for reinsurance or ceding commissions.
  • guanosine triphosphate — GTP.
  • 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.
  • help a person off with — to assist a person in the removal of (clothes)
  • 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.
  • hepatitis non-a, non-b — a disease of the liver that is clinically indistinguishable from hepatitis B but is caused by a retrovirus or retroviruslike agent.
  • high-speed net connect — (hardware, communications)   (HNC) A network interface unit for BS2000 mainframes based on Novell NetWare, supporting Ethernet and FDDI.
  • hold the purse strings — hold the purse strings, to have the power to determine how money shall be spent.
  • horn-rimmed spectacles — spectacles with rims made of material resembling horn
  • horseradish peroxidase — Histology. an enzyme, isolated from horseradish, that when microinjected can be detected by the colored products of the reaction it catalyzes, used as a tracer, as in tracing the route of a motor neuron from the cell body in the spinal cord to the muscle it innervates.
  • hospital administrator — a person who works in the management team of a hospital
  • 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.
  • hypothetical syllogism — a hypothetical syllogism has two uses. In propositional logic it expresses one of the rules of inference, while in the history of logic, it is a short-hand for the theory of consequence
  • if push comes to shove — to press upon or against (a thing) with force in order to move it away.
  • in anticipation of sth — If something is done in anticipation of an event, it is done because people believe that event is going to happen.
  • in the lap of the gods — If you say that a situation is in the lap of the gods, you mean that its success or failure depends entirely on luck or on things that are outside your control.
  • independent assortment — law of independent assortment.
  • independent suspension — an automotive suspension system in which each wheel is attached to the frame independently, so that a road bump affecting one wheel has no effect on the others.
  • information processing — processing of information, especially the handling of information by computers in accordance with strictly defined systems of procedure.
  • interoperable database — A database front-end which communicates with multiple heterogenous databases and makes them appear as a single homogenous entity with semantic calls. See ODBC.
  • 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
  • interrogator-responsor — a radio or radar transceiver for sending a signal to a transponder and receiving and interpreting the reply.
  • 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
  • japanese umbrella pine — a single aberrant species of pine, Sciadopitys verticillata, in which the leaves are fused in pairs and the crown is spire-shaped
  • 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.
  • jump out of one's skin — to be very startled
  • keep a person guessing — to let a person remain in a state of uncertainty
  • keep a stiff upper lip — either of the two fleshy parts or folds forming the margins of the mouth and functioning in speech.
  • landscape architecture — the art of arranging or modifying the features of a landscape, an urban area, etc., for aesthetic or practical reasons.
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • lesser spotted dogfish — a small spotted European shark, Scyliorhinus caniculus
  • let sth drop/fall/slip — If you let drop, let fall, or let slip information, you reveal it casually or by accident, during a conversation about something else.
  • 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.
  • little st bernard pass — a pass over the Savoy Alps, between Bourg-Saint-Maurice, France, and La Thuile, Italy: 11th-century hospice. Height: 2187 m (7177 ft)
  • lord justice of appeal — an ordinary judge of the Court of Appeal
  • love-hate relationship — If you have a love-hate relationship with someone or something, your feelings towards them change suddenly and often from love to hate.
  • lowest common multiple — the smallest number that is a common multiple of a given set of numbers.
  • 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/prove one's point — If you make your point or prove your point, you prove that something is true, either by arguing about it or by your actions or behaviour.
  • 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.
  • microspectrophotometer — a spectrophotometer for examining light emitted, transmitted, or reflected by minute objects.
  • microspectrophotometry — a spectrophotometer for examining light emitted, transmitted, or reflected by minute objects.
  • 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.
  • mind one's p's and q's — to be careful to behave correctly and use polite or suitable language
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