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19-letter words containing u, n, s, c

  • jump to conclusions — to come to a conclusion prematurely, without sufficient thought or on incomplete evidence
  • 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.
  • kick up one's heels — the back part of the human foot, below and behind the ankle.
  • knights of columbus — an international fraternal and benevolent organization of Roman Catholic men, founded in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1882.
  • 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
  • liability insurance — insurance covering the insured against losses arising from injury or damage to another person or property.
  • lift up one's voice — to speak out loudly
  • logical consequence — the relation that obtains between the conclusion and the premises of a formally valid argument
  • lucent technologies — (company, telecommunications, Unix)   The former systems and equipment portion of AT&T (including Bell Laboratories), split off in 1996.
  • luminous efficiency — the perceived brightness of light as a ratio of the total luminous flux to total radiant flux of the source; a measure of brightness obtained by dividing the source's luminous flux by the consumption of its energy.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • membership function — fuzzy subset
  • 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.
  • miscellaneous items — various kinds of thing, esp small purchases
  • molecular astronomy — the branch of astronomy dealing with the study of molecules in space.
  • 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.
  • music to one's ears — something that is very pleasant to hear
  • narcotics anonymous — an organization that helps drug users recover from drug addiction
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • neufchâtel (cheese) — a soft white cheese prepared from whole milk or skim milk and eaten fresh or cured
  • neuropsychodynamics — The theoretical synthesis of neuroscience and psychodynamics.
  • newcastle upon tyne1st Duke of, Pelham-Holles, Thomas.
  • nicolaus copernicus — Nicolaus [nik-uh-ley-uh s] /ˌnɪk əˈleɪ əs/ (Show IPA), (Mikolaj Kopernik) 1473–1543, Polish astronomer who promulgated the now accepted theory that the earth and the other planets move around the sun (the Copernican System)
  • non causa pro causa — the fallacy of giving as a reason for a conclusion a proposition not actually relevant to that conclusion.
  • non-contemporaneous — living or occurring during the same period of time; contemporary.
  • northern hog sucker — black sucker.
  • noughts and crosses — tick-tack-toe (def 1).
  • noughts-and-crosses — tick-tack-toe (def 1).
  • nuclear disarmament — the gradual reduction and eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons in the world
  • obsolescence clause — a clause in an insurance policy that takes account of the obsolescence of the item insured in order to lower the amount to be paid out in the event of a claim
  • oceanus procellarum — (Ocean of Storms) the largest dark plain on the face of the moon, in the second and third quadrants: about 2 million square miles (5.2 million sq. km).
  • old church slavonic — the oldest attested Slavic language, an ecclesiastical language written first by Cyril and Methodius in a Bible translation of the 9th century and continued in use for about two centuries. It represents the South Slavic, Bulgarian dialect of 9th-century Salonika with considerable addition of other South and West Slavic elements. Abbreviation: OCS.
  • old spanish customs — irregular practices among a group of workers to gain increased financial allowances, reduced working hours, etc
  • ole custom controls — (programming)   (OCX) An Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) custom control allowing infinite extension of the Microsoft Access control set. OCX is similar in purpose to VBX used in Visual Basic. Available OCX's include "Scroll Bar Control", "Calendar Control", and "Data Outline Control".
  • on (or off) course — moving (or not moving) in the intended direction
  • on cue/as if on cue — If you say that something happened on cue or as if on cue, you mean that it happened just when it was expected to happen, or just at the right time.
  • open source license — (legal)   Any document that attempts to specify open source usage and distribution of software. These licenses are usually drafted by experts and are likely to be more legally sound than one a programmer could write. However, loopholes do exist. Here is a non-exhaustive list of open source licenses: 1. Public Domain - No license. 2. BSD License - An early open source license 3. General Public License (GPL) - The copyleft license of the Free Software Foundation. Used for GNU software and much of Linux. 4. Artistic License Less restrictive than the GPL, permitted by Perl in addition to the GPL. 5. Mozilla Public Licenses. (MPL, MozPL) and Netscape Public License (NPL).
  • ordnance survey map — An Ordnance Survey map is a detailed map produced by the British or Irish government map-making organization.
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