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21-letter words containing t, h, a, l

  • maidenhair spleenwort — an evergreen fern, Asplenium trichomanes, abundant in woody areas of the North Temperate Zone, having thickly clustered fronds.
  • main-topsail schooner — a two-masted or three-masted schooner having square topsails on the foremast and mainmast: a jackass brig or jackass bark.
  • maître d'hôtel butter — melted butter mixed with parsley and lemon juice
  • majority shareholding — a holding of more than half a company's shares
  • make yourself at home — settle in
  • maryland yellowthroat — (in former systems of nomenclature) the common yellowthroat, Geothlypis trichas, especially the eastern U.S. subspecies.
  • maximum value theorem — the theorem that for a real-valued function f whose domain is a compact set, there is at least one element x in the domain of f for which f (x) achieves its largest value.
  • mechanical instrument — a musical instrument, such as a barrel organ or music box, that plays a preselected piece of music by mechanical means
  • mechanical metallurgy — the branch of metallurgy dealing with the response of metals to applied forces.
  • mechanical solidarity — social cohesiveness that is based on shared activities, beliefs, and experiences and is characteristic of simple traditional societies.
  • mechanical weathering — any of the various weathering processes that cause physical disintegration of exposed rock without any change in the chemical composition of the rock: Collision between rock surfaces can cause mechanical weathering.
  • megaspore mother cell — a diploid cell in plants that undergoes meiosis to create four haploid megaspores.
  • mengistu haile mariam — born 1937, Ethiopian political leader: head of state 1977–87; president 1987–91.
  • methylisothiazolinone — (chemistry) A powerful biocide and preservative within the group of isothiazolinones, used in shampoos etc.
  • monochloroacetic acid — chloroacetic acid.
  • mother-of-pearl cloud — nacreous cloud.
  • mother-of-pearl glass — an American art glassware having colored glass set into indentations in a thickness of opaque glass, the whole covered with clear glass and etched slightly with acid.
  • motherwell and wishaw — a burgh in the Motherwell district, in S Scotland.
  • motivational research — the application of the knowledge and techniques of the social sciences, especially psychology and sociology, to understanding consumer attitudes and behavior: used as a guide in advertising and marketing.
  • multichannel analyser — an electronic instrument, such as a pulse height analyser, that splits an input waveform into a large number of channels in accordance with a particular parameter of the input
  • nightmare file system — Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher spl level). Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation snowballs very quickly, and soon the entire network of machines is frozen - worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great misfeature). ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of Unix's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s. See also broadcast storm.
  • no less a person than — a person of no lower importance, rank, etc. than
  • north atlantic treaty — the treaty (1949) signed by 12 countries, providing for the establishment of NATO.
  • northumberland strait — the part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence that separates Prince Edward Island from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in SE Canada. About 200 miles (320 km) long; 9–30 miles (15–48 km) wide.
  • not hold one's breath — If you say that you won't hold your breath, you mean that you do not expect something to happen even though someone has suggested that it might.
  • nothing in particular — not anything specific
  • old spanish practices — irregular practices among a group of workers to gain increased financial allowances, reduced working hours, etc
  • ophthalmia neonatorum — inflammation of the eyes of a newborn child due to an infectious disease, as gonorrhea, contracted during birth from the infected mother.
  • orthogonal projection — a two-dimensional graphic representation of an object in which the projecting lines are at right angles to the plane of the projection. Also called orthogonal projection. Compare isometric (def 5).
  • orthogonal trajectory — the locus of a point whose path cuts each curve of a family of curves at right angles.
  • otorhinolaryngologist — (medicine) Doctor specializing in otorhinolaryngology, the study of ear, nose, and throat.
  • pacific daylight time — the version of Pacific Standard Time that is in use when daylight saving time is being observed
  • peephole optimisation — (compiler)   A kind of low-level code optimisation that considers only a few adjacent machine code instructions at a time and looks for certain combinations which can be replaced with more efficient sequences. E.g. ADD R0, #1 ADD R0, #1 (add one to register R0) could be replaced by ADD R0, #2 as long as there were no jumps to the second instruction.
  • peephole optimization — peephole optimisation
  • pellitory-of-the-wall — an urticaceous plant, P. diffusa, of the S and W European genus Parietaria, which grows in crevices and has long narrow leaves and small pink flowers
  • pentamethylenediamine — cadaverine.
  • phrase-structure rule — a rule that generates a sentence or other syntactic construction from words and phrases and identifies its constituent structure.
  • physical anthropology — the branch of anthropology dealing with the evolutionary changes in human anatomy and physiology, using mensurational and descriptive techniques.
  • pipelined burst cache — Pipeline Burst Cache
  • play with a full deck — Nautical. a floorlike surface wholly or partially occupying one level of a hull, superstructure, or deckhouse, generally cambered, and often serving as a member for strengthening the structure of a vessel. the space between such a surface and the next such surface above: Our stateroom was on B deck.
  • polygenic inheritance — the heredity of complex characters that are determined by a large number of genes, each one usually having a relatively small effect.
  • populist shop steward — a shop steward who operates in a delegate role, putting the immediate interests of his members before union principles and policies
  • programmed cell death — a normal, genetically regulated process leading to the death of cells and triggered by the presence or absence of certain stimuli, as DNA damage.
  • propantheline bromide — a substance, C 2 3 H 3 0 BrNO 3 , used in the treatment of peptic ulcers.
  • public health service — the agency that is responsible for the health of the general public
  • pull sth out of a hat — To pull something out of the hat means to do something unexpected which helps you to succeed, often when you are failing.
  • pulse height analyser — a multichannel analyser that sorts pulses into selected amplitude ranges
  • pulse height analyzer — an instrument that records or counts an electrical pulse if its amplitude falls within specified limits: used in nuclear physics research for the determination of energy spectra of nuclear radiations
  • put sb in their place — If you put someone in their place, you show them that they are less important or clever than they think they are.
  • ralph roister doister — a play (1553?) by Nicholas Udall: the earliest known English comedy.
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