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15-letter words containing s, w, e, t

  • hostile witness — a witness who gives evidence against the party calling him
  • housewifization — The process by which the division of labor has relegated women into housewives.
  • hunt the wumpus — (games, history)   (Or "Wumpus") /wuhm'p*s/ A famous fantasy computer game, created by Gregory Yob in about 1973. Hunt the Wumpus appeared in Creative Computing, Vol 1, No 5, Sep - Oct 1975, where Yob says he had come up with the game two years previously, after seeing the grid-based games Hurkle, Snark and Mugwump at People's Computing Company (PCC). He later delivered Wumpus to PCC who published it in their newsletter. ESR says he saw a version including termites running on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System in 1972-3. Magnus Olsson, in his 1992-07-07 USENET article <[email protected]>, posted the BASIC source code of what he believed was pretty much the version that was published in 1973 in David Ahl's "101 Basic Computer Games", by Digital Equipment Corporation. The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported other topologies, including an icosahedron and M"obius strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave with five "crooked arrows"; these could be shot through up to three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for players, the movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and drop you at a random location (later versions added "anaerobic termites" that ate arrows, bat migrations and earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations). This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it prefigured ADVENT and Zork and was directly ancestral to both (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat colony). There have been many ports including one distributed with SunOS, a freeware one for the Macintosh and a C emulation by ESR.
  • identical twins — one of a pair of twins who develop from a single fertilized ovum and therefore have the same genotype, are of the same sex, and usually resemble each other closely.
  • in all weathers — If you say that someone does something in all weathers, you mean that they do it regularly whether the weather is good or bad.
  • in harness with — in cooperation with
  • in the same way — similarly
  • intertwistingly — by intertwisting
  • james rainwater — (Leo) James, 1917–86, U.S. physicist: Nobel prize 1975.
  • jayhawker state — Kansas (used as a nickname).
  • jewelers' putty — putty powder.
  • john lewis list — a list used by clerks in the House of Commons to assess the amount that may reasonably be claimed for various items by Members of Parliament as living expenses
  • joint ownership — sharing of property
  • kidasa software — (company)   A company which develops project management software for Microsoft Windows.
  • knebworth house — a Tudor mansion in Knebworth in Hertfordshire: home of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton; decorated (1843) in the Gothic style
  • label switching — (networking)   A routing technique that uses information from existing IP routing protocols to identify IP datagrams with labels and forwards them to a modified switch or router, which then uses the labels to switch the datagrams through the network. Label switching combines the best attributes of data link layer (layer two) switching (as in ATM and Frame Relay) with the best attributes of network layer (layer three) routing (as in IP). Prior to the formation of the MPLS Working Group in 1997, a number of vendors had announced and/or implemented proprietary label switching.
  • lady's bedstraw — a Eurasian rubiaceous plant, Galium verum, with clusters of small yellow flowers
  • lake washington — a lake in W Washington, forming the E boundary of the city of Seattle: linked by canal with Puget Sound. Length: about 32 km (20 miles). Width: 6 km (4 miles)
  • legacy software — legacy system
  • levant wormseed — the dried, unexpanded flower heads of a wormwood, Artemisia cina (Levant wormseed) or the fruit of certain goosefoots, especially Chenopodium anthelminticum (or C. ambrosioides), the Mexican tea or American wormseed, used as an anthelmintic drug.
  • lobster newburg — (sometimes lowercase) lobster cooked in a thick seasoned cream sauce made with sherry or brandy.
  • long sweetening — liquid sweetening, as maple syrup, molasses, or sorghum.
  • low pass filter — (electronics, graphics)   A filter that attenuates high frequency components of a signal. In image processing, a low pass filter might be used to remove noise from an image.
  • low-cholesterol — containing little dietary cholesterol
  • low-level waste — waste material contaminated by traces of radioactivity that can be disposed of in steel drums in concrete-lined trenches but not (since 1983) in the sea
  • low-pass filter — a filter that transmits all frequencies below a specified value, substantially attenuating frequencies above this value
  • lower criticism — a form of Biblical criticism having as its purpose the reconstruction of the original texts of the books of the Bible.
  • lower east side — a section in the borough of Manhattan, New York: noted for its immigrant culture.
  • manx shearwater — a European oceanic bird, Puffinus puffinus, with long slender wings and black-and-white plumage: family Procellariidae (shearwaters)
  • multiphase flow — Multiphase flow is a type of flow that involves more than one fluid, for example a liquid and a gas, or two liquids that do not mix.
  • natural wastage — Natural wastage is the process of employees leaving their jobs because they want to retire or move to other jobs, rather than because their employer makes them leave.
  • neck sweetbread — sweetbread (def 2).
  • nest of drawers — a miniature chest of drawers made in the 18th century, often set on top of a desk or table.
  • network address — (networking)   1. The network portion of an IP address. For a class A network, the network address is the first byte of the IP address. For a class B network, the network address is the first two bytes of the IP address. For a class C network, the network address is the first three bytes of the IP address. In each case, the remainder is the host address. In the Internet, assigned network addresses are globally unique. See also subnet address, Internet Registry. 2. (Or "net address") An electronic mail address on the network. In the 1980s this might have been a bang path but now (1997) it is nearly always a domain address. Such an address is essential if one wants to be to be taken seriously by hackers; in particular, persons or organisations that claim to understand, work with, sell to, or recruit from among hackers but *don't* display net addresses are quietly presumed to be clueless poseurs and mentally flushed. Hackers often put their net addresses on their business cards and wear them prominently in contexts where they expect to meet other hackers face-to-face (e.g. science-fiction fandom). This is mostly functional, but is also a signal that one identifies with hackerdom (like lodge pins among Masons or tie-dyed T-shirts among Grateful Dead fans). Net addresses are often used in e-mail text as a more concise substitute for personal names; indeed, hackers may come to know each other quite well by network names without ever learning each others' real monikers. See also sitename, domainist.
  • network segment — (networking)   A part of an Ethernet or other network, on which all message traffic is common to all nodes, i.e. it is broadcast from one node on the segment and received by all others. This is normally because the segment is a single continuous conductor, though it may include repeaters(?). Since all nodes share the physical medium, collision detection or some other protocol is required to determine whether a message was transmitted without interference from other nodes. The receiving node inspects the destination address of a packet to tell if it was (one of) the intended recipient(s). Communication between nodes on different segments is via one or more routers.
  • neural networks — any group of neurons that conduct impulses in a coordinated manner, as the assemblages of brain cells that record a visual stimulus.
  • new hampshirite — of New Hampshire
  • new south wales — a state in SE Australia. 309,433 sq. mi. (801,430 sq. km). Capital: Sydney.
  • new territories — a British crown colony comprising Hong Kong island (29 sq. mi.; 75 sq. km), Kowloon peninsula, nearby islands, and the adjacent mainland in SE China (New Territories) reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. 404 sq. mi. (1046 sq. km). Capital: Victoria.
  • new westminster — a city in SW British Columbia, in SW Canada, on the Fraser River: suburb of Vancouver.
  • newton's cradle — an ornamental puzzle consisting of a frame in which five metal balls are suspended in such a way that when one is moved it sets all the others in motion in turn
  • newton's method — a process for approximating the roots of an equation by replacing the curve representing the equation by its tangent and finding the intersection of the tangent with the x-axis and iterating this process.
  • north-northwest — the point on the compass midway between north and northwest. Abbreviation: NNW.
  • northeastwardly — Towards the northeast.
  • northwestwardly — Towards the northwest.
  • old wives' tale — a traditional belief, story, or idea that is often of a superstitious nature.
  • outside forward — one of two attacking players who usually play on the far side of the field; wing.
  • packet-switched — packet switching
  • personal growth — development as an individual
  • phase-switching — a technique used in radio interferometry in which the signal from one of the two antennae is periodically reversed in phase before being multiplied by the signal from the other antenna
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