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20-letter words containing s, u, r, e, t

  • instruction prefetch — (architecture)   A technique which attempts to minimise the time a processor spends waiting for instructions to be fetched from memory. Instructions following the one currently being executed are loaded into a prefetch queue when the processor's external bus is otherwise idle. If the processor executes a branch instruction or receives an interrupt then the queue must be flushed and reloaded from the new address. Instruction prefetch is often combined with pipelining in an attempt to keep the pipeline busy. By 1995 most processors used prefetching, e.g. Motorola 680x0, Intel 80x86.
  • insulin-coma therapy — a former treatment for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, employing insulin-induced hypoglycemia as a method for producing convulsive seizures.
  • intervening sequence — a noncoding segment in a length of DNA that interrupts a gene-coding sequence or nontranslated sequence, the corresponding segment being removed from the RNA copy before transcription.
  • intestinal fortitude — courage; resoluteness; endurance; guts: to have intestinal fortitude.
  • intravenous drug use — the injection of drugs intravenously
  • intruder in the dust — a novel (1948) by William Faulkner.
  • inventory adjustment — Inventory adjustments are increases or decreases made in inventory to account for theft, loss, breakages, and errors in the amount or number of items received.
  • isochronous transfer — isochronous
  • jack russell terrier — any of a breed of terrier with short hair and a mottled brown and white coat
  • james prescott joule — James Prescott, 1818–89, English physicist.
  • john o'groat's house — the northern tip of Scotland, near Duncansby Head, NE Caithness, traditionally thought of as the northernmost point of Britain: from Land's End to John o'Groat's House.
  • joint life insurance — life insurance covering two or more persons, the benefits of which are paid after the first person dies.
  • keep your mouth shut — If you keep your mouth shut about something, you do not talk about it, especially because it is a secret.
  • keratoconjunctivitis — inflammation of the cornea and conjunctiva.
  • laurentian mountains — a range of low mountains in E Canada, in Quebec between the St Lawrence River and Hudson Bay. Highest point: 1191 m (3905 ft)
  • law of superposition — Geology. a basic law of geochronology, stating that in any undisturbed sequence of rocks deposited in layers, the youngest layer is on top and the oldest on bottom, each layer being younger than the one beneath it and older than the one above it.
  • least-squares method — a method of estimating values from a set of observations by minimizing the sum of the squares of the differences between the observations and the values to be found.
  • life-support machine — A life-support machine is the equipment that is used to keep a person alive when they are very ill and cannot breathe without help.
  • linguistic geography — dialect geography.
  • linguistic universal — language universal.
  • liturgy of the hours — a revision (promulgated in 1970) of the arrangement and texts of the Divine Office
  • lonely hearts column — the part of a newspaper or magazine where lonely hearts ads appear
  • love's labour's lost — a comedy (1594–95?) by Shakespeare.
  • lump in one's throat — the passage from the mouth to the stomach or to the lungs, including the pharynx, esophagus, larynx, and trachea.
  • magical mystery tour — something exciting and mysterious; esp an exploration of a new place where somebody being shown or taken around does not know where exactly they will be going
  • manufacturer's agent — an agent representing one or more manufacturers in selling related but noncompeting goods, usually on a commission basis and in a particular territory.
  • mare tranquillitatis — (Sea of Tranquillity) a dark plain in the first quadrant of the face of the moon: about 110,000 sq. mi. (285,000 sq. km).
  • marquis de lafayette — Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier [ma-ree zhaw-zef pawl eev rawk zheel-ber dy maw-tyey] /maˈri ʒɔˈzɛf pɔl iv rɔk ʒilˈbɛr dü mɔˈtyeɪ/ (Show IPA), Marquis de. Also, La Fayette. 1757–1834, French soldier, statesman, and liberal leader, who served in the American Revolutionary Army as aide-de-camp to General Washington, and took a leading part in the French revolutions of 1789 and 1830.
  • mary, queen of scots — family name Stuart. 1542–87, queen of Scotland (1542–67); daughter of James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise. She was married to Francis II of France (1558–60), her cousin Lord Darnley (1565–67), and the Earl of Bothwell (1567–71), who was commonly regarded as Darnley's murderer. She was forced to abdicate in favour of her son (later James VI of Scotland) and fled to England. Imprisoned by Elizabeth I until 1587, she was beheaded for plotting against the English crown
  • mass-energy equation — the equation, E=mc2, formulated by Albert Einstein, expressing the equivalence between mass and energy, where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the velocity of light.
  • measure one's length — to fall, lie, or be thrown down at full length
  • mecklenburg-strelitz — a former state in NE Germany, formed in 1934 from two states (Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz)
  • membranous labyrinth — an intricate combination of paths or passages in which it is difficult to find one's way or to reach the exit. Synonyms: maze, network, web.
  • menstrual extraction — an abortion procedure involving suction aspiration of the uterine contents early in gestation, before the first missed menstrual period: sometimes performed later.
  • midcourse correction — a navigational correction made in the course of a ship, airplane, rocket, or space vehicle at some point between the beginning and end of the journey.
  • miliary tuberculosis — tuberculosis in which the bacilli are spread by the blood from one point of infection, producing small tubercles in other parts of the body.
  • military superiority — the power, strength, or numbers of armed forces of a country viewed as an advantage over another country
  • mitral insufficiency — abnormal closure of the mitral valve resulting in regurgitation of blood into the atrium and leading to reduced heart function or heart failure.
  • molecular gastronomy — an approach to cooking in which a chef’s knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology allows him or her to experiment with unusual flavour combinations and cooking techniques
  • molecular geneticist — a specialist in the study of the molecular constitution of genes and chromosomes
  • moreton bay chestnut — an Australian leguminous tree, Castanospermum australe, having thin smooth bark and yellow or reddish flowers: used in furniture manufacture
  • most general unifier — (logic)   If U is the most general unifier of a set of expressions then any other unifier, V, can be expressed as V = UW, where W is another substitution. See also unification.
  • motor neuron disease — Motor neuron disease is a disease which destroys the part of a person's nervous system that controls movement.
  • mountain rescue team — a group of people who conduct search and rescue on a mountain, for example of someone who has fallen, got lost, etc
  • multi-user dimension — (games)   (MUD) (Or Multi-User Domain, originally "Multi-User Dungeon") A class of multi-player interactive game, accessible via the Internet or a modem. A MUD is like a real-time chat forum with structure; it has multiple "locations" like an adventure game and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic and a simple economic system. A MUD where characters can build more structure onto the database that represents the existing world is sometimes known as a "MUSH". Most MUDs allow you to log in as a guest to look around before you create your own character. Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU- form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the University of Essex's DEC-10 in 1979. It was a game similar to the classic Colossal Cave adventure, except that it allowed multiple people to play at the same time and interact with each other. Descendants of that game still exist today and are sometimes generically called BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth that the name MUD was trademarked to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto: "You haven't *lived* 'til you've *died* on MUD!"); however, this is false - Richard Bartle explicitly placed "MUD" in the PD in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth. Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction. Because these had an image as "research" they often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the fact that Usenet feeds have been spotty and difficult to get in the UK, made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there. AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and quickly gained popularity in the US; they became nuclei for large hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasise social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed to combat and competition. In 1991, over 50% of MUD sites are of a third major variety, LPMUD, which synthesises the combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. The trend toward greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue. The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. There is now a move afoot to deprecate the term MUD itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to the different simulation styles being explored. See also bonk/oif, FOD, link-dead, mudhead, MOO, MUCK, MUG, MUSE, chat.
  • multicast addressing — Ethernet addressing scheme used to send packets to devices of a certain type or for broadcasting to all nodes. The least significant bit of the most significant byte of a multi-cast address is one.
  • multipart stationery — continuous stationery comprising two or more sheets, either carbonless or with carbon paper between the sheets
  • multiple personality — a rare disorder in which an individual displays several functionally dissociated personalities, each of a complexity comparable to that of a normal individual.
  • multipurpose vehicle — a large car, similar to a van, designed to carry up to eight passengers
  • multistep hydroplane — a motorship having a flat bottom built as a series of planes inclined forward, the ship planing on each from stem to stern as its speed increases.
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