0%

18-letter words containing t, r

  • law of gravitation — a law stating that any two masses attract each other with a force equal to a constant (constant of gravitation) multiplied by the product of the two masses and divided by the square of the distance between them.
  • 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 at the door of — to blame (a person) for
  • lean manufacturing — efficiency in the production of goods
  • leatherback turtle — a sea turtle, Dermochelys coriacea, having the shell embedded in a leathery skin, reaching a length of more than 7 feet (2.1 meter) and a weight of more than 1000 pounds (450 kg): the largest living sea turtle; an endangered species.
  • leave in the lurch — a situation at the close of various games in which the loser scores nothing or is far behind the opponent.
  • left-eyed flounder — any of several flat-fishes of the family Bothidae, having both eyes on the left side of the head.
  • legislative branch — the branch of government having the power to make laws; the legislature.
  • lenticular process — a method for producing images with a three-dimensional effect by photographing on lenticulated film.
  • lesser whitethroat — an Old World warbler, Sylvia curruca, having a greyish-brown plumage with a white throat and underparts
  • let oneself in for — If you say that you did not know what you were letting yourself in for when you decided to do something, you mean you did not realize how difficult, unpleasant, or expensive it was going to be.
  • lieutenant general — a commissioned officer ranking next below a general and next above a major general.
  • light welterweight — an amateur boxer weighing 60–63.5 kg (132–140 pounds)
  • lighting cameraman — the person who designs and supervises the lighting of scenes to be filmed
  • lightning arrester — a device for preventing damage to radio, telephonic, or other electric equipment from lightning or other high-voltage currents, using spark gaps to carry the current to the ground without passing through the device.
  • limited government — confined within limits; restricted or circumscribed: a limited space; limited resources.
  • lincoln's birthday — February 12, a legal holiday in some states of the U.S., in honor of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.
  • linear accelerator — an accelerator in which particles are propelled in straight paths by the use of alternating electric voltages that are timed in such a way that the particles receive increasing increments of energy.
  • linear combination — a sum of products of each quantity times a constant: The expression aX + bY + cZ is a linear combination of X, Y, and Z, where a, b, and c are constants.
  • linear perspective — a mathematical system for representing three-dimensional objects and space on a two-dimensional surface by means of intersecting lines that are drawn vertically and horizontally and that radiate from one point (one-point perspective) two points (two-point perspective) or several points on a horizon line as perceived by a viewer imagined in an arbitrarily fixed position.
  • liqueur chocolates — chocolates containing liqueur
  • liquid distributor — A liquid distributor is a device which is used to spread liquid when it enters a packed column (= a tall vessel with packing, used for separating substances).
  • list comprehension — (functional programming)   An expression in a functional language denoting the results of some operation on (selected) elements of one or more lists. An example in Haskell: This returns all pairs of numbers (x,y) where x and y are elements of the list 1, 2, ..., 10, y <= x and their sum is less than 10. A list comprehension is simply "syntactic sugar" for a combination of applications of the functions, concat, map and filter. For instance the above example could be written: The term "list comprehension" appears in the references below. The earliest reference to the notation is in Rod Burstall and John Darlington's description of their language, NPL. David Turner subsequently adopted this notation in his languages SASL, KRC and Miranda, where he has called them "ZF expressions", set abstractions and list abstractions (in his 1985 FPCA paper [Miranda: A Non-Strict Functional Language with Polymorphic Types]).
  • literae humaniores — (at Oxford University) the faculty concerned with Greek and Latin literature, ancient history, and philosophy; classics
  • literal-mindedness — the quality or state of tending to take words in their literal sense
  • literary criticism — study and review of literature
  • lithostratigraphic — Of or pertaining to lithostratigraphy.
  • little st. bernard — Great, a mountain pass between SW Switzerland and NW Italy, in the Pennine Alps: Napoleon led his army through it in 1800; location of a hospice. 8108 feet (2470 meters) high.
  • local area network — a system for linking private telecommunications equipment, as in a building or cluster of buildings.
  • logarithmic spiral — log r = aθ
  • logarithmus dualis — (mathematics)   (ld) Latin for logarithm base two. More commonly written as "log" with a subscript "2". Roughly the number of bits required to represent an integer.
  • lone-parent family — a family in which there is only one parent
  • lonely hearts club — a club for people who are trying to find a lover or a friend
  • long hundredweight — a hundredweight of 112 pounds (50.8 kg), the usual hundredweight in Great Britain, but now rare in the U.S.
  • long-horned beetle — any of numerous, often brightly colored beetles of the family Cerambycidae, usually with long antennae, the larva of which bores into the wood of living or decaying trees.
  • long-hours culture — The long-hours culture is the way in which some workers feel that they are expected to work much longer hours than they are paid to do.
  • long-stay car park — a car park (eg at an airport) where cars can be left for a long time
  • look the other way — look in the opposite direction
  • loosestrife family — the plant family Lythraceae, characterized by herbaceous plants, shrubs, and trees having usually opposite or whorled, simple leaves, clusters of flowers, and fruit in the form of a capsule, and including the crape myrtle, loosestrifes of the genus Lythrum, and the henna shrub.
  • lord chief justice — the presiding judge of Britain's High Court of Justice, the superior court of record for both criminal and civil cases.
  • loschmidt's number — the number of molecules in one cubic centimeter of an ideal gas at standard temperature and pressure, equal to 2.687 × 10 19.
  • 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.
  • lower klamath lake — See under Klamath Lakes.
  • lower palaeolithic — the earliest of the three sections of the Palaeolithic, beginning about 3 million years ago and ending about 70 000 bc with the emergence of Neanderthal man
  • lunitidal interval — the period of time between the moon's transit and the next high lunar tide.
  • macroinvertebrates — Plural form of macroinvertebrate.
  • 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".
  • magistrate's court — a court having limited jurisdiction over minor civil and criminal matters, as matters of contract not exceeding a particular amount of money.
  • magistrates' court — law: handles minor crimes
Was this page helpful?
Yes No
Thank you for your feedback! Tell your friends about this page
Tell us why?