20-letter words containing u, n, r, e
- industrial relations — (used with a plural verb) the dealings or relations of an industrial concern with its employees, with labor in general, with the public, etc.
- inertial upper stage — a U.S. two-stage, solid-propellant rocket used to boost a relatively heavy spacecraft from a low earth orbit into a planetary trajectory or an elliptical transfer orbit. Abbreviation: IUS.
- inferior conjunction — the alignment of an inferior planet between the sun and the earth.
- information builders — Distributors of LEVEL5 OBJECT. Telephone +1 800 969 INFO.
- inland revenue stamp — a certificate issued by the Inland Revenue to acknowledge payment of tax
- instruction mnemonic — (programming) A word or acronym used in assembly language to represent a binary machine instruction operation code. Different processors have different instruction sets and therefore use a different set of mnemonics to represent them. E.g. ADD, B (branch), BLT (branch if less than), SVC, MOVE, LDR (load register).
- instruction prefetch — (architecture) A technique which attempts to minimise the time a processor spends waiting for instructions to be fetched from memory. Instructions following the one currently being executed are loaded into a prefetch queue when the processor's external bus is otherwise idle. If the processor executes a branch instruction or receives an interrupt then the queue must be flushed and reloaded from the new address. Instruction prefetch is often combined with pipelining in an attempt to keep the pipeline busy. By 1995 most processors used prefetching, e.g. Motorola 680x0, Intel 80x86.
- insulin-coma therapy — a former treatment for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, employing insulin-induced hypoglycemia as a method for producing convulsive seizures.
- intermittent current — a direct current that is interrupted at intervals.
- intervening sequence — a noncoding segment in a length of DNA that interrupts a gene-coding sequence or nontranslated sequence, the corresponding segment being removed from the RNA copy before transcription.
- intestinal fortitude — courage; resoluteness; endurance; guts: to have intestinal fortitude.
- intravenous drug use — the injection of drugs intravenously
- intruder in the dust — a novel (1948) by William Faulkner.
- inventory adjustment — Inventory adjustments are increases or decreases made in inventory to account for theft, loss, breakages, and errors in the amount or number of items received.
- isochronous transfer — isochronous
- java virtual machine — (language, architecture) (JVM) A specification for software which interprets Java programs that have been compiled into byte-codes, and usually stored in a ".class" file. The JVM instruction set is stack-oriented, with variable instruction length. Unlike some other instruction sets, the JVM's supports object-oriented programming directly by including instructions for object method invocation (similar to subroutine call in other instruction sets). The JVM itself is written in C and so can be ported to run on most platforms. It needs thread support and I/O (for dynamic class loading). The Java byte-code is independent of the platform. There are also some hardware implementations of the JVM.
- job control language — a language used to construct statements that identify a particular job to be run and specify the job's requirements to the operating system under which it will run. Abbreviation: JCL.
- john o'groat's house — the northern tip of Scotland, near Duncansby Head, NE Caithness, traditionally thought of as the northernmost point of Britain: from Land's End to John o'Groat's House.
- joint life insurance — life insurance covering two or more persons, the benefits of which are paid after the first person dies.
- jordan curve theorem — the theorem that the complement of a simple closed curve can be expressed as the union of two disjoint sets, each having as boundary the given curve.
- judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
- junior featherweight — a boxer weighing up to 122 pounds (54.9 kg), between bantamweight and featherweight.
- keep one's pecker up — If you tell someone to keep their pecker up, you are encouraging them to be cheerful in a difficult situation.
- kentucky coffee tree — a tall North American tree, Gymnocladus dioica, of the legume family, the seeds of which (Kentucky coffee beans) were formerly used as a substitute for coffee beans.
- keratoconjunctivitis — inflammation of the cornea and conjunctiva.
- kluver-bucy syndrome — a syndrome caused by bilateral injury to the temporal lobes and characterized by memory defect, hypersexuality, excessive oral behavior, and diminished fear reactions.
- knock the tar out of — any of various dark-colored viscid products obtained by the destructive distillation of certain organic substances, as coal or wood.
- kruger national park — a wildlife sanctuary in NE South Africa: the world's largest game reserve. Area: over 21 700 sq km (8400 sq miles)
- laboratory equipment — apparatus for scientific research and experiments
- labour-saving device — a machine, gadget, etc, that reduces (human) effort, hard work or labour
- languedoc-roussillon — a region of S France, on the Gulf of Lions: consists of the departments of Lozère, Gard, Hérault, Aude, and Pyrénées-Orientales; mainly mountainous with a coastal plain
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- linguistic universal — language universal.
- liquidity preference — (in Keynesian economics) the degree of individual preference for cash over less liquid assets.
- llywelyn ap gruffudd — died 1282, prince of Wales (1258–82): the only Welsh ruler to be recognized as such by the English
- lonely hearts column — the part of a newspaper or magazine where lonely hearts ads appear
- 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.
- macular degeneration — degeneration of the central portion of the retina, resulting in a loss of sharp vision.
- maintenance and cure — the right of an injured sailor to support and medical treatment.
- 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.
- manufacturer's agent — an agent representing one or more manufacturers in selling related but noncompeting goods, usually on a commission basis and in a particular territory.