15-letter words containing w, a, l
- griqualand west — a former district in S South Africa, N of the Orange River and W of the Orange Free State: diamonds found 1867.
- half wellington — a loose boot extending to just above the ankle and usually worn under the trousers.
- half-wave plate — a crystal thin enough to cause a phase difference of 180° between the ordinary and extraordinary rays of polarized light, thereby changing the direction of the plane of polarization.
- hardware dealer — a person or shop who deals in metal tools and implements and mechanical equipment and components, etc
- heads will roll — If you say that heads will roll as a result of something bad that has happened, you mean that people will be punished for it, especially by losing their jobs.
- heath speedwell — a temperate scrophulariaceous plant, Veronica officinalis, having small blue or pinkish white flowers
- hebrew calendar — the lunisolar calendar used by Jews, as for determining religious holidays, that is reckoned from 3761 b.c. and was established by Hillel II in the 4th century a.d., the calendar year consisting of 353 days (defective year) 354 days (regular year) or 355 days (perfect year or abundant year) and containing 12 months: Tishri, Heshvan, Kislev, Tevet, Shevat, Adar, Nisan, Iyar, Sivan, Tammuz, Av, and Elul, with the 29-day intercalary month of Adar Sheni added after Adar seven times in every 19-year cycle in order to adjust the calendar to the solar cycle. The Jewish ecclesiastical year begins with Nisan and the civil year with Tishri.
- hewlett-packard — (HP) Hewlett-Packard designs, manufactures and services electronic products and systems for measurement, computation and communications. The company's products and services are used in industry, business, engineering, science, medicine and education in approximately 110 countries. HP was founded in 1939 and employs 96600 people, 58900 in the USA. They have manufacturing and R&D establishments in 54 cities in 16 countries and approximately 600 sales and service offices in 110 countries. Their revenue (in 1992/1993?) was $20.3 billion. The Chief Executive Officer is Lewis E. Platt. HP's stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange and the Pacific, Tokyo, London, Frankfurt, Zurich and Paris exchanges. Quarterly sales $6053M, profits $347M (Aug 1994).
- horizontal well — A horizontal well is a well which has sections that have been drilled at more than 80 degrees from the vertical in order to penetrate a greater length of the reservoir.
- identical twins — one of a pair of twins who develop from a single fertilized ovum and therefore have the same genotype, are of the same sex, and usually resemble each other closely.
- in a family way — pregnant; with child
- in all weathers — If you say that someone does something in all weathers, you mean that they do it regularly whether the weather is good or bad.
- irvine dataflow — (language) (Always called "Id") A non-strict, single assignment language and incremental compiler developed by Arvind and Gostelow and used on MIT's Tagged-Token Dataflow Architecture and planned to be used on Motorola's Monsoon. See also Id Nouveau.
- ja well no fine — used to indicate reluctant acceptance
- javelin thrower — a person who throws a javelin
- jewish calendar — the lunisolar calendar used by the Jews, in which time is reckoned from 3761 bc: regarded as the year of the Creation. The months, Nisan, Iyar, Sivan, Tammuz, Av, Elul, Tishri, Cheshvan, Kislev, Tevet, Shevat, and Adar, have either 29 or 30 days. Originally a new month was declared when the new moon was sighted in Jerusalem, but when this became impossible, a complex formula was devised to keep Rosh Chodesh near to the new moon. In addition, to keep the harvest festivals in the right seasons, there is a Metonic cycle of 14 years, in five of which an additional month is added after Shevat. The year according to biblical reckoning begins with Nisan, and the civil year begins with Tishri; the years are numbered from Tishri
- judicial review — the power of a court to adjudicate the constitutionality of the laws of a government or the acts of a government official.
- kirchhoff's law — the law that the algebraic sum of the currents flowing toward any point in an electric network is zero.
- knowledge-based — characterized by the dominance of information services as an area of growth
- label switching — (networking) A routing technique that uses information from existing IP routing protocols to identify IP datagrams with labels and forwards them to a modified switch or router, which then uses the labels to switch the datagrams through the network. Label switching combines the best attributes of data link layer (layer two) switching (as in ATM and Frame Relay) with the best attributes of network layer (layer three) routing (as in IP). Prior to the formation of the MPLS Working Group in 1997, a number of vendors had announced and/or implemented proprietary label switching.
- lady's bedstraw — a Eurasian rubiaceous plant, Galium verum, with clusters of small yellow flowers
- lady-in-waiting — a lady who is in attendance upon a queen or princess.
- lake washington — a lake in W Washington, forming the E boundary of the city of Seattle: linked by canal with Puget Sound. Length: about 32 km (20 miles). Width: 6 km (4 miles)
- language lawyer — A person, usually an experienced or senior software engineer, who is intimately familiar with many or most of the numerous restrictions and features (both useful and esoteric) applicable to one or more computer programming languages. A language lawyer is distinguished by the ability to show you the five sentences scattered through a 200-page manual that together imply the answer to your question "if only you had thought to look there". Compare wizard, legal, legalese.
- law of averages — a statistical principle formulated by Jakob Bernoulli to show a more or less predictable ratio between the number of random trials of an event and its occurrences.
- law of identity — the law that any proposition implies itself.
- law of the mean — the theorem that for a function continuous on a closed interval and differentiable on the corresponding open interval, there is a point in the interval such that the difference in functional values at the endpoints is equal to the derivative evaluated at the particular point and multiplied by the difference in the endpoints.
- law-enforcement — of police, anti-crime
- leadwort family — the plant family Plumbaginaceae, characterized by shrubs and herbaceous plants of seacoasts and semiarid regions, having basal or alternate leaves, spikelike clusters of tubular flowers, and dry, one-seeded fruit, and including leadwort, sea lavender, statice, and thrift.
- leeward islands — a group of islands in the Caribbean, in the N Lesser Antilles between Puerto Rico and Martinique
- legacy software — legacy system
- levant wormseed — the dried, unexpanded flower heads of a wormwood, Artemisia cina (Levant wormseed) or the fruit of certain goosefoots, especially Chenopodium anthelminticum (or C. ambrosioides), the Mexican tea or American wormseed, used as an anthelmintic drug.
- level two cache — secondary cache
- look forward to — to turn one's eyes toward something or in some direction in order to see: He looked toward the western horizon and saw the returning planes.
- lord-in-waiting — a nobleman in attendance on a British monarch or the Prince of Wales.
- low archipelago — a group of French islands in the S Pacific. 332 sq. mi. (860 sq. km).
- low bandwidth x — (networking) (LBX) An implementation of the X Window System designed to improve performance over ISDN, WAN, and serial lines.
- low earth orbit — (communications) (LEO) The kind of orbit used by communications satellites that will offer high bandwidth for video on demand, television, and Internet communications. A satellite in LEO, in contrast to one in a geostationary orbit, is not in a fixed position relative to the Earth's surface so several satellites are required to provide continuous service.
- low pass filter — (electronics, graphics) A filter that attenuates high frequency components of a signal. In image processing, a low pass filter might be used to remove noise from an image.
- low-level waste — waste material contaminated by traces of radioactivity that can be disposed of in steel drums in concrete-lined trenches but not (since 1983) in the sea
- low-maintenance — requiring little attention or upkeep
- low-pass filter — a filter that transmits all frequencies below a specified value, substantially attenuating frequencies above this value
- lower east side — a section in the borough of Manhattan, New York: noted for its immigrant culture.
- lower slobbovia — any place considered to be remote, poor, or unenlightened.
- lowland gorilla — the eastern lowland gorilla or western lowland gorilla. See under gorilla.
- lutzow-holm bay — an inlet of the Indian Ocean on the coast of Antarctica between Queen Maud Land and Enderby Land.
- make allowances — to take mitigating circumstances into account in consideration (of)
- make sb welcome — If you make someone welcome or make them feel welcome, you make them feel happy and accepted in a new place.
- marigold window — wheel window.
- meals on wheels — a program, usually one supported or subsidized by a charitable, social, or government agency, for delivering hot meals regularly to elderly, disabled, or convalescing persons who are housebound and cannot cook for themselves.