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20-letter words containing u, l, o

  • laugh one's head off — Phrases such as laugh your head off and scream your head off can be used to emphasize that someone is laughing or screaming a lot or very loudly.
  • laurentian mountains — a range of low mountains in E Canada, in Quebec between the St Lawrence River and Hudson Bay. Highest point: 1191 m (3905 ft)
  • law of large numbers — the theorem in probability theory that the number of successes increases as the number of experiments increases and approximates the probability times the number of experiments for a large number of experiments.
  • law of superposition — Geology. a basic law of geochronology, stating that in any undisturbed sequence of rocks deposited in layers, the youngest layer is on top and the oldest on bottom, each layer being younger than the one beneath it and older than the one above it.
  • law-and-order issues — issues concerning law and social conventions
  • least-squares method — a method of estimating values from a set of observations by minimizing the sum of the squares of the differences between the observations and the values to be found.
  • leg-of-mutton sleeve — a sleeve on a woman's garment that is loose on the arm but tight at the wrist
  • lieutenant commander — a commissioned officer ranking next below a commander and next above a lieutenant.
  • life-support machine — A life-support machine is the equipment that is used to keep a person alive when they are very ill and cannot breathe without help.
  • light the touchpaper — to do something that will cause much anger or excitement
  • lighthouse coffeepot — a coffeepot of the late 17th and 18th centuries, having a tapering, circular body with a domed lid.
  • like a house on fire — If two people get on like a house on fire, they quickly become close friends, for example because they have many interests in common.
  • linguistic geography — dialect geography.
  • liturgy of the hours — a revision (promulgated in 1970) of the arrangement and texts of the Divine Office
  • logarithmic function — a function defined by y = log bx, especially when the base, b, is equal to e, the base of natural logarithms.
  • logical construction — anything referred to by an incomplete symbol capable of contextual definition.
  • lonely hearts column — the part of a newspaper or magazine where lonely hearts ads appear
  • longitude by account — the longitude of the position of a vessel as estimated by dead reckoning.
  • longitudinal framing — a system for framing steel vessels in which light, closely spaced, longitudinal frames are connected by heavy, widely spaced transverse frames with deep webs.
  • longitudinal section — the representation of an object as it would appear if cut by the vertical plane passing through the longest axis of the object.
  • look before you leap — be aware of the risks involved in sth
  • lou gehrig's disease — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
  • love's labour's lost — a comedy (1594–95?) by Shakespeare.
  • lump in one's throat — the passage from the mouth to the stomach or to the lungs, including the pharynx, esophagus, larynx, and trachea.
  • lunisolar precession — the principal component of the precession of the equinoxes, produced by the gravitational attraction of the sun and the moon on the equatorial bulge of the earth.
  • lutherville-timonium — a city in N Maryland, near Baltimore.
  • lymphogranulomatosis — widespread infectious granuloma of the lymphatic system.
  • macular degeneration — degeneration of the central portion of the retina, resulting in a loss of sharp vision.
  • magical mystery tour — something exciting and mysterious; esp an exploration of a new place where somebody being shown or taken around does not know where exactly they will be going
  • mail-order catalogue — a catalogue of goods you can buy from a particular company by mail order
  • malpighian corpuscle — Also called kidney corpuscle, Malpighian body. the structure at the beginning of a vertebrate nephron, consisting of a glomerulus and its surrounding Bowman's capsule.
  • manuel avila camacho — Manuel Ávila [mah-nwel ah-vee-lah] /mɑˈnwɛl ˈɑ viˌlɑ/ (Show IPA). Manuel Avila Camacho.
  • massachusetts ballot — a ballot on which the candidates, with their party designations, are listed alphabetically in columns under the office for which they were nominated.
  • measure one's length — to fall, lie, or be thrown down at full length
  • meissner's corpuscle — tactile corpuscle.
  • member of the public — a member of the general population
  • membranous labyrinth — an intricate combination of paths or passages in which it is difficult to find one's way or to reach the exit. Synonyms: maze, network, web.
  • menstrual extraction — an abortion procedure involving suction aspiration of the uterine contents early in gestation, before the first missed menstrual period: sometimes performed later.
  • miliary tuberculosis — tuberculosis in which the bacilli are spread by the blood from one point of infection, producing small tubercles in other parts of the body.
  • military superiority — the power, strength, or numbers of armed forces of a country viewed as an advantage over another country
  • molecular gastronomy — an approach to cooking in which a chef’s knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology allows him or her to experiment with unusual flavour combinations and cooking techniques
  • molecular geneticist — a specialist in the study of the molecular constitution of genes and chromosomes
  • molybdenum disulfide — a black crystalline powder, MoS 2 , insoluble in water, used as a lubricant and as a hydrogenation catalyst.
  • monosodium glutamate — a white, crystalline, water-soluble powder, C 5 H 8 NNaO 4 ⋅H 2 O, used to intensify the flavor of foods.
  • most general unifier — (logic)   If U is the most general unifier of a set of expressions then any other unifier, V, can be expressed as V = UW, where W is another substitution. See also unification.
  • mpeg-1 audio layer 1 — (audio, compression, algorithm)   (MP1) A simple 32-subband audio compressor using a floating point representation for subband samples. Resolution and scale factor are stored for groups of 12 subsamples. MP1 is only used for Philips DCC Digital Compact cassette with data rates of 384 kbps.
  • mpeg-1 audio layer 3 — (music, file format)   (MP3) A digital audio compression algorithm that acheives a compression factor of about twelve while preserving sound quality. It does this by optimising the compression according to the range of sound that people can actually hear. MP3 is currently (July 1999) the most powerful algorithm in a series of audio encoding standards developed under the sponsorship of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and formalised by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). MP3 is very different from Layer 2, using an additional MDCT layer to increase frequency resolution. Its scale factor groups are more optimised for the human ear, and it uses nonlinear sample quantisation and Huffman coding. MP3 files (filename extension ".mp3") can be downloaded from many websites and can be played using software available for most operating systems (also downloadable), e.g. Winamp for PC, MacAmp for Macintosh, and mpeg123 for Unix. MP3 files are usually downloaded completely before playing but streaming MP3 is also possible. A program called a "ripper" can be used to copy a selection from a music CD onto your hard disk and another program called an encoder can convert it to an MP3 file.
  • mpeg-2 audio layer 3 — (compression, standard, algorithm, file format)   An extention of MPEG-1 audio layer 3 for lower sampling rates (16-24 kHz) targeting bit rates from 32-64 kbps (possibly 8-160 kbps). It is often combined with MPEG-2 LSF.
  • muller-lyer illusion — a geometric illusion in which two lines of equal length appear unequal depending on whether angular lines forming arrowheads at each end point toward or away from each other.
  • multi-user dimension — (games)   (MUD) (Or Multi-User Domain, originally "Multi-User Dungeon") A class of multi-player interactive game, accessible via the Internet or a modem. A MUD is like a real-time chat forum with structure; it has multiple "locations" like an adventure game and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic and a simple economic system. A MUD where characters can build more structure onto the database that represents the existing world is sometimes known as a "MUSH". Most MUDs allow you to log in as a guest to look around before you create your own character. Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU- form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the University of Essex's DEC-10 in 1979. It was a game similar to the classic Colossal Cave adventure, except that it allowed multiple people to play at the same time and interact with each other. Descendants of that game still exist today and are sometimes generically called BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth that the name MUD was trademarked to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto: "You haven't *lived* 'til you've *died* on MUD!"); however, this is false - Richard Bartle explicitly placed "MUD" in the PD in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth. Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction. Because these had an image as "research" they often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the fact that Usenet feeds have been spotty and difficult to get in the UK, made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there. AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and quickly gained popularity in the US; they became nuclei for large hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasise social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed to combat and competition. In 1991, over 50% of MUD sites are of a third major variety, LPMUD, which synthesises the combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. The trend toward greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue. The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. There is now a move afoot to deprecate the term MUD itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to the different simulation styles being explored. See also bonk/oif, FOD, link-dead, mudhead, MOO, MUCK, MUG, MUSE, chat.
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