15-letter words containing u, n, e, m
- hung parliament — a parliament that does not have a party with a working majority
- hunt the wumpus — (games, history) (Or "Wumpus") /wuhm'p*s/ A famous fantasy computer game, created by Gregory Yob in about 1973. Hunt the Wumpus appeared in Creative Computing, Vol 1, No 5, Sep - Oct 1975, where Yob says he had come up with the game two years previously, after seeing the grid-based games Hurkle, Snark and Mugwump at People's Computing Company (PCC). He later delivered Wumpus to PCC who published it in their newsletter. ESR says he saw a version including termites running on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System in 1972-3. Magnus Olsson, in his 1992-07-07 USENET article <[email protected]>, posted the BASIC source code of what he believed was pretty much the version that was published in 1973 in David Ahl's "101 Basic Computer Games", by Digital Equipment Corporation. The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported other topologies, including an icosahedron and M"obius strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave with five "crooked arrows"; these could be shot through up to three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for players, the movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and drop you at a random location (later versions added "anaerobic termites" that ate arrows, bat migrations and earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations). This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it prefigured ADVENT and Zork and was directly ancestral to both (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat colony). There have been many ports including one distributed with SunOS, a freeware one for the Macintosh and a C emulation by ESR.
- hurdle champion — a hurdler who has defeated all others in a competition
- hyperinsulinism — excessive insulin in the blood, resulting in hypoglycemia.
- hypoalbuminemia — an abnormally small quantity of albumin in the blood.
- hypoinsulinemia — (medicine) An abnormally low level of insulin in the blood.
- hypoinsulinemic — Having hypoinsulinemia.
- ibero-maurusian — of or relating to an Epipaleolithic culture of northwestern Africa that preceded the Capsian culture and was once erroneously thought to have originated in southwestern Europe; characterized by the use of backed bladelets, occupation of the maritime plain, and the hunting of the Barbary sheep.
- ignominiousness — The state or quality of being ignominious.
- image-conscious — concerned about the way one comes across to other people and the impression one creates
- immensurability — The quality of being immensurable.
- immune response — any of the body's immunologic reactions to an antigen.
- immunoadsorbent — immunosorbent.
- immunoassayable — Suitable for immunoassay.
- immunochemistry — the study of the chemistry of immunologic substances and reactions.
- immunocompetent — having the potential for immunologic response; capable of developing immunity after exposure to antigen.
- immunodeficient — Exhibiting immunodeficiency.
- immunoreactions — Plural form of immunoreaction.
- impecuniousness — The property of being impecunious.
- implausibleness — The quality of being implausible.
- importunateness — Quality of being importunate.
- impulse turbine — a turbine moved by free jets of fluid striking the blades of the rotor together with the axial flow of fluid through the rotor.
- in all but name — If you say that a situation exists in all but name, you mean that it is not officially recognized even though it exists.
- in rerum natura — in the nature of things
- in some measure — a unit or standard of measurement: weights and measures.
- in the doldrums — miserable, depressed
- in your dreams! — You say `In your dreams!' when you think that what someone wants is never going to happen or be true.
- inch of mercury — a unit of atmospheric pressure, being the pressure equal to that exerted by a column of mercury one inch high under standard conditions of temperature and gravity: 33.864 millibars. Abbreviation: in. Hg.
- incommensurable — not commensurable; having no common basis, measure, or standard of comparison.
- incommensurably — In an incommensurable manner; immeasurably.
- incommunicative — not communicative; reserved; uncommunicative.
- indian mulberry — a small tree, Morinda citrifolia, of the madder family, found from India to Australasia, having shiny leaves, white flowers, and fleshy, yellowish fruit, yielding red and yellow dyes.
- inhomogeneously — lack of homogeneity.
- innate immunity — natural bodily resistance to disease
- instrumentalism — the variety of pragmatism developed by John Dewey, maintaining that the truth of an idea is determined by its success in the active solution of a problem and that the value of ideas is determined by their function in human experience.
- instrumentalist — a person who plays a musical instrument.
- instrumentality — the quality or state of being instrumental.
- instrumentation — the arranging of music for instruments, especially for an orchestra.
- insurance claim — request for insurance to be paid
- insurance stamp — an insurance contribution
- intellectualism — devotion to intellectual pursuits.
- interambulacral — relating to, or situated between, interambulacra
- interambulacrum — the area between two of an echinoderm's ambulacra
- interim results — A company's interim results are the set of figures, published outside the regular times, that show whether it has achieved a profit or a loss.
- intermodulation — the production in an electrical device of frequencies that are the sums or differences of frequencies of different inputs or of their harmonics.
- internet number — internet address
- isotopic number — the number of neutrons minus the number of protons in an atomic nucleus.
- jerusalem thorn — See under Christ's-thorn.
- job requirement — a quality or qualification that you must have in order to be suitable for a certain job
- junggrammatiker — a group of linguists of the late 19th century who held that phonetic laws are universally valid and allow of no exceptions; neo-grammarians.