15-letter words containing s, w, e
- how come/how so — You ask 'How come?' or 'How so?' when you are surprised by something and are asking why it happened or was said.
- hump one's swag — (of a tramp) to carry one's belongings from place to place on one's back
- hundred flowers — the 1957 political campaign in the People's Republic of China to encourage greater freedom of intellectual expression, initiated by Mao Zedong under the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.”.
- 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.
- jewelers' rouge — the brownish-red oxide of iron produced by heating ferrous sulfate: used chiefly as a pigment in paints and theatrical rouge, and as a polishing agent.
- jewish calendar — the lunisolar calendar used by the Jews, in which time is reckoned from 3761 bc: regarded as the year of the Creation. The months, Nisan, Iyar, Sivan, Tammuz, Av, Elul, Tishri, Cheshvan, Kislev, Tevet, Shevat, and Adar, have either 29 or 30 days. Originally a new month was declared when the new moon was sighted in Jerusalem, but when this became impossible, a complex formula was devised to keep Rosh Chodesh near to the new moon. In addition, to keep the harvest festivals in the right seasons, there is a Metonic cycle of 14 years, in five of which an additional month is added after Shevat. The year according to biblical reckoning begins with Nisan, and the civil year begins with Tishri; the years are numbered from Tishri
- jewish princess — JAP.
- 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
- keep one's word — a unit of language, consisting of one or more spoken sounds or their written representation, that functions as a principal carrier of meaning. Words are composed of one or more morphemes and are either the smallest units susceptible of independent use or consist of two or three such units combined under certain linking conditions, as with the loss of primary accent that distinguishes black·bird· from black· bird·. Words are usually separated by spaces in writing, and are distinguished phonologically, as by accent, in many languages.
- 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
- knowledge-based — characterized by the dominance of information services as an area of growth
- 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)
- law of averages — a statistical principle formulated by Jakob Bernoulli to show a more or less predictable ratio between the number of random trials of an event and its occurrences.
- leeward islands — a group of islands in the Caribbean, in the N Lesser Antilles between Puerto Rico and Martinique
- 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.
- levelling screw — a screw, often one of three, for adjusting the level of an apparatus
- 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.
- lower slobbovia — any place considered to be remote, poor, or unenlightened.
- lzw compression — Lempel-Ziv Welch compression
- mad cow disease — BSE: bovine spongiform encephalopathy
- make allowances — to take mitigating circumstances into account in consideration (of)
- make sb welcome — If you make someone welcome or make them feel welcome, you make them feel happy and accepted in a new place.
- manx shearwater — a European oceanic bird, Puffinus puffinus, with long slender wings and black-and-white plumage: family Procellariidae (shearwaters)
- meadow mushroom — any of various fleshy fungi including the toadstools, puffballs, coral fungi, morels, etc.
- meals on wheels — a program, usually one supported or subsidized by a charitable, social, or government agency, for delivering hot meals regularly to elderly, disabled, or convalescing persons who are housebound and cannot cook for themselves.
- mendeleev's law — periodic law (def 2).
- mishnaic hebrew — the Hebrew language as used from about a.d. 70 to 500.
- moccasin flower — the lady's-slipper.
- moving sidewalk — a moving surface, similar to a conveyor belt, for carrying pedestrians.
- 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.