23-letter words containing u, a
- have one's work cut out — to have as much work as one can manage
- have struck/hit paydirt — If you say that someone has struck paydirt or has hit paydirt, you mean that they have achieved sudden success or gained a lot of money very quickly.
- heaviside unit function — the function that is zero for any number less than zero and that is 1 for any number greater than or equal to zero.
- hermit of st. augustine — a member of an order of mendicant friars, founded in 1256.
- heterogeneous catalysis — Heterogeneous catalysis is catalysis in which the catalyst does not take part in the reaction that it increases.
- hire purchase agreement — an agreement between a seller and a buyer for the buyer to purchase something on hire purchase
- horsehair-blight fungus — a fungal parasite, Marasmius equicrinis, that causes a disease of certain tropical plants, especially tea.
- hortense de beauharnais — Beauharnais, Eugénie Hortense de.
- human leukocyte antigen — HLA.
- human rights campaigner — a person who campaigns for human rights
- hunchback of notre dame — French Notre Dame de Paris. a novel (1831) by Victor Hugo.
- hunter-killer satellite — a satellite designed to seek out and destroy a nearby enemy satellite by exploding itself into a cloud of high-speed metal fragments.
- hunter-killer submarine — a submarine designed and equipped to pursue and destroy enemy craft
- hydrochlorofluorocarbon — Any of a class of inert compounds of carbon, hydrogen, hydrocarbons, chlorine, and fluorine, used in place of chlorofluorocarbons as being somewhat less destructive to the ozone layer.
- hypergeometric equation — a differential equation of the form, (x 2 − x) d 2 y / d 2 x + [(a+b +1) x−c ] dy/dx + abx =0, where a, b, and c are arbitrary constants.
- immigration authorities — the authorities or official government bodies who regulate laws regarding immigration and immigrants
- immunological tolerance — the absence of antibody production in response to the presence of antigens, usually as a result of previous exposure to the antigens
- implementation language — (language) (IMP) An extension of B with floating-point operations, developed by W. Davidsen at General Electric in 1970 for the GE 600. It was also cross-compiled to VAX and Intel 8080.
- in favour/out of favour — If someone or something is in favour, people like or support them. If they are out of favour, people no longer like or support them.
- in the arms of morpheus — sleeping
- in the nature of things — If you say that something is in the nature of things, you mean that you would expect it to happen in the circumstances mentioned.
- in your heart of hearts — If you believe or know something in your heart of hearts, that is what you really believe or think, even though it may sometimes seem that you do not.
- incontestability clause — a clause in a life-insurance or health-insurance policy stating that the insurer cannot contest the policy after a stated period of time.
- industrial psychologist — a person who studies human behaviour and cognitive processes in relation to the working environment
- initial public offering — An initial public offering is the first offering of stock when a company goes public.
- inland marine insurance — insurance chiefly covering risks to goods and means of transportation involved in the transporting of goods overland or by inland waterways.
- interfascicular cambium — cambium that develops between the vascular bundles.
- internal rate of return — an interest rate giving a net present value of zero when applied to the expected cash flow of a project. Its value, compared to the cost of the capital involved, is used to determine the project's viability
- internal reconstruction — the hypothetical reconstruction of an earlier stage of a language or of some part of it, as its phonology, by deductions from irregularities in its present structure, as the reconstruction of a stage in English when certain instances of r were related to s in a systematic way by comparing the pair was:were to other pairs, as lose:forlorn.
- internet public library — (IPL) A project at the University of Michigan School of Information and Library Studies to provide an on-line, 24 hour public library, chaired by an assemblage of librarians and information industry professionals. The library aims to provide library services to a target audience estimated to number 1/4 of the entire American population by the end of the century. The Internet Public Library is scheduled to go on-line in March 1995. Among the first services will be on-line reference; youth services; user education; and professional services for librarians. Mailing list: [email protected]
- islamic fundamentalists — Muslims who believe in, advocate or support a conservative adherence to literal or traditional interpretations of the Qu'ran and the Sunnah
- joint test action group —
- juan rodriguez cabrillo — Juan Rodríguez [rod-ree-ges] /rɒdˈri gɛs/ (Show IPA), (Joao Rodrigues Cabrilho) 1499?–1543, Spanish explorer, born in Portugal: discovered California.
- juvenile-onset diabetes — diabetes (def 3).
- katmai new instructions — Streaming SIMD Extensions
- keep sth under your hat — If you tell someone to keep a piece of information under their hat, you are asking them not to tell anyone else about it.
- l'apres-midi d'un faune — L'Après-midi d'un Faune.
- largemouth (black) bass — a black bass (Micropterus salmoides) found in warm, sluggish waters
- laughlin air force base — U.S. Air Force installation in SW Texas, SE of Del Rio.
- lead up the garden path — a plot of ground, usually near a house, where flowers, shrubs, vegetables, fruits, or herbs are cultivated.
- leave no stone unturned — the hard substance, formed of mineral matter, of which rocks consist.
- leave well enough alone — in a good or satisfactory manner: Business is going well.
- lesser antillean iguana — a large tropical American arboreal herbivorous lizard (iguana delicatissima) native to the Lesser Antilles
- letter-quality printing — high-quality output in printed form from a printer linked to a word processor
- lieutenant junior grade — a commissioned officer ranking above an ensign and below a lieutenant.
- light and shade surface — (in architectural shades and shadows) a surface in a plane tangent to the parallel rays from the theoretical light source, treated as a shade surface.
- lingual protrusion lisp — a speech defect consisting in pronouncing s and z like or nearly like the th- sounds of thin and this, respectively.
- liquefied petroleum gas — a mixture of various petroleum gases, esp propane and butane, stored as a liquid under pressure and used as an engine fuel
- locally euclidean space — a topological space in which each point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to an open set in a Euclidean space of specified dimension.
- lossy audio compression — (audio, compression) Any audio compression algorithm which does not retain every bit of data but only reproduces a signal that sounds more or less like the original. Examples are MP1, MP2, MP3, AAC.