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18-letter words containing s, w, a

  • eyewitness account — a description given by someone who was present at an event
  • farewell-to-spring — a slender, showy plant, Clarkia amoena, of the evening primrose family, native to western North America, having satiny, cup-shaped, lilac-crimson or reddish-pink flowers and roundish fruit.
  • fitzwilliam museum — a museum, attached to Cambridge University and founded in 1816, noted esp for its paintings and collections devoted to the applied arts
  • flame-of-the-woods — an Indian evergreen shrub, Ixora coccinea, of the madder family, having red, tubular flowers in dense clusters.
  • flash butt welding — a method of welding metal edge-to-edge with a powerful electric flash followed by the application of pressure.
  • forwarding address — address for mail to be sent on
  • french west africa — a former French federation in W Africa, including Dahomey (now Benin), French Guinea, French Sudan (now Mali), Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Upper Volta (now Burkina Fasso).
  • ftp software, inc. — (company)   Developers of the original PC/TCP Packet Driver specification. Address: 26 Princess St. Wakefield, MA 01880-3004. Telephone: +1 (617) 246 0900.
  • get one's end away — to have sexual intercourse
  • get one's own back — of, relating to, or belonging to oneself or itself (usually used after a possessive to emphasize the idea of ownership, interest, or relation conveyed by the possessive): He spent only his own money.
  • give someone a row — to scold someone; tell someone off
  • go with the stream — to conform to the accepted standards
  • good samaritan law — a law that exempts from legal liability persons, sometimes only physicians, who give reasonable aid to strangers in grave physical distress.
  • greater shearwater — a sooty-brown and white shearwater, Puffinus gravis, of eastern coasts of the Western Hemisphere.
  • greater yellowlegs — either of two American shorebirds having yellow legs, Tringa melanoleuca (greater yellowlegs) or T. flavipes (lesser yellowlegs)
  • greenhouse warming — the increase in the mean temperature of the earth attributed to the greenhouse effect
  • haud your wheesht! — be silent! hush!
  • have a screw loose — a metal fastener having a tapered shank with a helical thread, and topped with a slotted head, driven into wood or the like by rotating, especially by means of a screwdriver.
  • have what it takes — be able or qualified for sth
  • have words with sb — If one person has words with another, or if two or more people have words, they have a serious discussion or argument, especially because one has complained about the other's behaviour.
  • hawksbill (turtle) — a medium-sized marine turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata, family Cheloniidae) having a hawklike beak and a horny shell from which tortoise shell is obtained
  • hearts and flowers — maudlin sentimentality: The play is a period piece, full of innocence abused and hearts and flowers.
  • hundred years' war — the series of wars between England and France, 1337–1453, in which England lost all its possessions in France except Calais.
  • in company with sb — If you feel, believe, or know something in company with someone else, you both feel, believe, or know it.
  • in comparison with — when compared to
  • in that/which case — You say in that case or in which case to indicate that what you are going to say is true if the possible situation that has just been mentioned actually exists.
  • in with a shout of — If you say that someone is in with a shout of achieving or winning something, you mean that they have a chance of achieving or winning it.
  • interest rate swap — An interest rate swap is a contract where two parties exchange the cash flow from interest rates.
  • inverse square law — one of several laws relating two quantities such that one quantity varies inversely as the square of the other, as the law that the illumination produced on a screen by a point source varies inversely as the square of the distance of the screen from the source.
  • iridescent seaweed — a red alga, Irideae cordata, found on the Pacific coast of North America, having broad, leathery, iridescent blades.
  • james baird weaver — James Baird, 1833–1912, U.S. politician: congressman 1879–81, 1885–89.
  • kawasaki's disease — a disease of children that causes a rash, fever, and swelling of the lymph nodes and often damages the heart muscle
  • 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 mass action — the statement that the rate of a chemical reaction is proportional to the concentrations of the reacting substances.
  • 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.
  • make sth one's own — If you make something your own, you become involved in it in such a way that people think of it as being related only to you or belonging only to you, rather than to anyone else.
  • malicious wounding — the intentional violent wounding or injuring of someone
  • 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.
  • negative cash flow — the situation when income is less than payments
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