19-letter words containing u, n, c, a
- juan de fuca strait — strait between Vancouver Island and NW Wash.: c. 100 mi (161 km) long
- judicial conference — a conference of judges held to discuss improvements in methods or judicial procedure through court rules or otherwise.
- judicial separation — a decree of legal separation of spouses that does not dissolve the marriage bond.
- junction transistor — a bipolar transistor consisting of two p-n junctions combined to form either an n-p-n or a p-n-p transistor, having the three electrodes, the emitter, base, and collector
- keep up appearances — If you keep up appearances, you try to behave and dress in a way that people expect of you, even if you can no longer afford it.
- knock-down-drag-out — marked by unrelenting violence: a knock-down-drag-out fight.
- knock-out agreement — an agreement between bidders at an auction or sale not to bid against each other
- lagrangian function — kinetic potential.
- lame duck amendment — an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1933, that abolished the December to March session of those Congressmen defeated for reelection in November.
- landrum-griffin act — an act of Congress (1959) outlawing secondary boycotts, requiring public disclosure of the financial records of unions, and guaranteeing the use of secret ballots in union voting.
- languages of choice — C and Lisp. Nearly every hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities. There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with Fortran, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as Real Programmers, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of Mel"). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but HLL implementation, glue, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. Fortran occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming. Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and Ada, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or other traditional card walloper languages as a total and unmitigated loss.
- league championship — the competition to become league champions
- least recently used — (operating systems) (LRU) A rule used in a paging system which selects a page to be paged out if it has been used (read or written) less recently than any other page. The same rule may also be used in a cache to select which cache entry to flush. This rule is based on temporal locality - the observation that, in general, the page (or cache entry) which has not been accessed for longest is least likely to be accessed in the near future.
- legislative council — the upper house of a bicameral legislature.
- leisure occupations — activities which you enjoy and which you perform in your free time
- leukoencephalopathy — (medicine) Any disease that effects the white matter of the brain.
- liability insurance — insurance covering the insured against losses arising from injury or damage to another person or property.
- lift the curtain on — to begin
- logical consequence — the relation that obtains between the conclusion and the premises of a formally valid argument
- logical unit number — (storage) (LUN) A 3-bit identifier used on a SCSI bus to distinguish between up to eight devices (logical units) with the same SCSI ID.
- machine instruction — (programming) The smallest element of a machine code program.
- magnesium carbonate — a white powder, MgCO 3 , insoluble in water and alcohol, soluble in acids, used in dentifrices and cosmetics, in medicine as an antacid, and as a refractory material.
- male chauvinist pig — male chauvinist.
- manchester autocode — (language, history) The predecessor of Mercury Autocode.
- manufacturing plant — factory
- mary mcleod bethune — Mary McLeod [muh-kloud] /məˈklaʊd/ (Show IPA), 1875–1955, U.S. educator and civil-rights leader.
- matthias i corvinus — ?1440–90, king of Hungary (1458–90): built up the most powerful kingdom in Central Europe. A patron of Renaissance art, he founded the Corvina library, one of the finest in Europe
- means of production — resources: equipment, workers
- metropolitan county — (in England) any of the six conurbations established as administrative units in the new local government system in 1974; the metropolitan county councils were abolished in 1986
- miniature schnauzer — one of a German breed of sturdily built terriers resembling a smaller version of the standard schnauzer, having a wiry, pepper-and-salt, black, or black-and-silver coat, a rectangular head, bushy whiskers, and a docked tail, and originally developed as a farm dog but now raised primarily as a pet.
- minimum iron fabric — cloth used to make clothes that require little ironing
- miscellaneous items — various kinds of thing, esp small purchases
- molecular astronomy — the branch of astronomy dealing with the study of molecules in space.
- mordvinian republic — a constituent republic of W central Russia, in the middle Volga basin. Capital: Saransk. Pop: 888 700 (2002). Area: 26 200 sq km (10 110 sq miles)
- mountain chinchilla — any of several long-tailed rodents of the genus Lagidium, having coarse poor quality fur
- muhammadan calendar — Muslim calendar.
- multiplexor channel — (MPX) mainframe terminology for a slow peripheral device connection, e.g. for a printer, operator console, or card reader.
- multiplication sign — Arithmetic. the symbol (⋅), (×), or (∗) between two mathematical expressions, denoting multiplication of the second expression by the first. In certain algebraic notations the sign is suppressed and multiplication is indicated by immediate juxtaposition or contiguity, as in ab.
- munchausen syndrome — a factitious disorder in which otherwise healthy individuals seek to hospitalize themselves with feigned or self-induced pathology in order to receive surgical or other medical treatment.
- municipal bond fund — a mutual fund that invests in municipal bonds.
- music to one's ears — something that is very pleasant to hear
- mutual fund company — a company that sells and manages mutual funds
- narcotics anonymous — an organization that helps drug users recover from drug addiction
- national curriculum — The National Curriculum is the course of study that most school pupils in England and Wales are meant to follow between the ages of 5 and 16.
- natural catastrophe — A natural catastrophe is an unexpected event, caused by nature, such as an earthquake or flood, in which there is a lot of suffering, damage, or death.
- natural killer cell — a small killer cell that destroys virus-infected cells or tumor cells without activation by an immune system cell or antibody.
- neats vs. scruffies — (artificial intelligence, jargon) The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in artificial intelligence research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; "neats" tend to try to build systems that "reason" in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while "scruffies" profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favour looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture "common sense" of living intelligences.
- neighbourhood watch — a scheme under which members of a community agree together to take responsibility for keeping an eye on each other's property, as a way of preventing crime
- neufchâtel (cheese) — a soft white cheese prepared from whole milk or skim milk and eaten fresh or cured
- neuropathologically — In a neuropathologic way.