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18-letter words containing s, w, a, r

  • king william's war — the war (1689–97) in which England and its American colonies and Indian allies opposed France and its Indian allies and which constituted the American phase of the War of the Grand Alliance.
  • kirtland's warbler — a wood warbler, Dendroica kirtlandii, breeding only in north-central Michigan and wintering in the Bahamas, bluish gray above, striped with black and pale yellow below: an endangered species.
  • known lazy bastard — (abuse)   (KLB) A term, used among technical support staff, for a user who repeatedly asks for help with problems whose solutions are clearly explained in the documentation, and persists in doing so after having been told to RTFM. KLBs are singled out for special treatment (i.e. ridicule), especially if they have been heard to say "It's so boring to read the manual! Why don't you just tell me?". The deepest pit in Hell is reserved for KLBs whose questions reveal total ignorance of the basic concepts (e.g., "How do I make a font in Excel?", "Where do I turn on my RAM?"), and who refuse to accept that their questions are neither simple nor well-formed.
  • law of segregation — the principle, originated by Gregor Mendel, stating that during the production of gametes the two copies of each hereditary factor segregate so that offspring acquire one factor from each parent.
  • lay down your arms — If soldiers lay down their arms, they stop fighting and give up their weapons.
  • lesser whitethroat — an Old World warbler, Sylvia curruca, having a greyish-brown plumage with a white throat and underparts
  • low-start mortgage — a mortgage in which interest only is repaid for a fixed period at the outset, to make it more affordable
  • lowell observatory — the astronomical observatory, situated in Flagstaff, Arizona, at which Pluto was discovered in 1930.
  • magic switch story — Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no-one knows who). You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labelled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words "magic" and "more magic". The switch was in the "more magic" position. I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side. It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed. Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the "more magic" position before reviving the computer. A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the "more magic" position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch. The computer promptly crashed. This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since. We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic. I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on "more magic".
  • make matters worse — If you say that something makes matters worse, you mean that it makes a difficult situation even more difficult.
  • make short work of — exertion or effort directed to produce or accomplish something; labor; toil.
  • mendel's first law — the principle, originated by Gregor Mendel, stating that during the production of gametes the two copies of each hereditary factor segregate so that offspring acquire one factor from each parent.
  • microwave spectrum — a spectrum of electromagnetic radiations whose wavelengths fall in the microwave range.
  • moscow art theater — a Russian theatrical company founded in 1898 principally by Konstantin Stanislavski and famous for its naturalistic acting.
  • new forest disease — an infectious eye disease causing acute eye pain in cattle
  • new orleans lugger — a half-decked fishing boat, formerly used on the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans, having a rather broad hull with centerboard and a single mast with a large dipping lugsail.
  • new storage system — (storage)   (NSS) A major Multics implementation project during the 1970s. The initial Multics file system design had evolved from the one-huge-disk world of CTSS. When multiple disk units were used they were just assigned increasing ranges of disk addresses, so a segment could have pages scattered over all disks on the system. This provided good I/O parallelism but made crash recovery expensive. NSS redesigned the lower levels of the file system, introducing the concepts of logical volume and physical volume and a mapping from a Multics directory branch to a VTOC entry for each file. The new system had much better recovery performance in exchange for a small space and performance cost.
  • north saskatchewan — a river in S central Canada, flowing E from the Rocky Mountains and joining the South Saskatchewan River to form the Saskatchewan River. 760 miles (1223 km) long.
  • operating software — software used in the operation of a computer system, typically by performing such tasks as memory allocation, job scheduling, and input/output control
  • oriental scops owl — any of a group of small owls having ear tufts and a whistling call, especially Otus scops (Old World scops owl) and O. sunia (Oriental scops owl)
  • owen stanley range — a mountain range in SE New Guinea. Highest peak: Mount Victoria, 4073 m (13 363 ft)
  • personal allowance — the amount of money you are allowed to earn each year without paying tax
  • peter tschaikowsky — Peter Ilyich [il-yich] /ˈɪl yɪtʃ/ (Show IPA), Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich.
  • prerelease showing — a showing of a film before it goes on general release
  • presumption of law — a presumption based upon a policy of law or a general rule and not upon the facts or evidence in an individual case.
  • przewalski's horse — a wild horse, Equus caballus przevalskii, chiefly of Mongolia and Sinkiang, characterized by light yellow coloring and a stiff, upright black mane with no forelock: the only remaining breed of wild horse, it is now endangered and chiefly maintained in zoos.
  • resistance welding — welding utilizing pressure and heat that is generated in the pieces to be welded by resistance to an electric current.
  • revolutionary wars — American Revolution.
  • rhode island white — one of a dual-purpose American breed of chickens having white feathers and a rose comb.
  • right-to-work laws — a state law making it illegal to refuse employment to a person for the sole reason that he or she is not a union member.
  • rosebay willowherb — a perennial onagraceous plant, Chamerion (formerly Epilobium) angustifolium, that has spikes of deep pink flowers and is widespread in open places throughout N temperate regions
  • row address strobe — (storage)   (RAS) An input to a dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) to indicate that the row address lines are valid.
  • russo-japanese war — the war (1904–1905) between Russia and Japan.
  • salem witch trials — 17th-century witchcraft case
  • saskatchewan party — (in Canada) a Saskatchewan political party formed by former members of the provincial Progressive Conservative and Liberal Parties
  • schwarz inequality — Also called Cauchy's inequality. the theorem that the inner product of two vectors is less than or equal to the product of the magnitudes of the vectors.
  • self-tapping screw — a screw designed to tap its corresponding female thread as it is driven.
  • sharp-shinned hawk — a North American hawk, Accipiter striatus, having extremely slender legs, a bluish-gray back, and a white, rusty-barred breast.
  • short-tailed shrew — a grayish-black shrew, Blarina brevicauda, common in eastern North America, that has a tail less than half the length of the body.
  • skinny-rib sweater — a tight-fitting ribbed woollen jumper or pullover
  • slow-motion replay — a showing again in slow motion of a sequence of action, esp of part of a sporting contest immediately after it happens
  • software backplane — (programming, tool)   A CASE framework from Atherton.
  • solomon rabinowitz — Solomon, Aleichem, Sholom.
  • sow dragon's teeth — to take some action that is intended to prevent strife or trouble but that actually brings it about
  • spike-tooth harrow — a harrow equipped with straight teeth on horizontal bars, usually employed to smooth and level plowed soil or seedbeds for planting or sowing.
  • spread one's wings — to make full use of one's abilities
  • st. andrew's cross — a low evergreen shrub, Ascyrum hypericoides, native to temperate and subtropical America, having flowers in clusters of three: often cultivated.
  • st. lawrence river — a river in SE Canada, flowing NE from Lake Ontario, forming part of the boundary between New York and Ontario, and emptying into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 760 miles (1225 km) long.
  • stomach sweetbread — sweetbread (def 1).
  • submarine sandwich — a sandwich made with a long cylindrical bread roll
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