18-letter words containing y, a, m, o
- lay down your arms — If soldiers lay down their arms, they stop fighting and give up their weapons.
- lone-parent family — a family in which there is only one parent
- loosestrife family — the plant family Lythraceae, characterized by herbaceous plants, shrubs, and trees having usually opposite or whorled, simple leaves, clusters of flowers, and fruit in the form of a capsule, and including the crape myrtle, loosestrifes of the genus Lythrum, and the henna shrub.
- madeira embroidery — broderie anglaise.
- magic switch story — Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no-one knows who). You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labelled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words "magic" and "more magic". The switch was in the "more magic" position. I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side. It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed. Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the "more magic" position before reviving the computer. A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the "more magic" position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch. The computer promptly crashed. This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since. We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic. I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on "more magic".
- magnetocrystalline — (physics) Describing the interaction between the magnetization and the crystal structure of a material.
- magnetoelectricity — electricity developed by the action of magnets.
- magnetogasdynamics — magnetohydrodynamics.
- management company — a company that manages a unit trust
- marine archaeology — the branch of archaeology that deals with the recovery of ancient objects found beneath the sea, as shipwrecks or remains from submerged islands, and with the techniques of underwater exploration, excavation, and retrieval.
- market opportunity — a situation in which a company can meet an unsatisfied customer need before its competitors
- maternity hospital — birthing facility
- may flower compact — an agreement to establish a government, entered into by the Pilgrims in the cabin of the Mayflower on November 11, 1620.
- medical dictionary — a specialized dictionary covering terms used in the health professions by doctors, nurses, and others involved in allied health care services. A dictionary with authoritative spellings and definitions is a particularly crucial resource in medicine, where a misspelling or misunderstanding can have unfortunate consequences for people under care. Print dictionaries in this field may be sorted alphabetically or may be categorized according to medical specializations or by the various systems in the body, as the immune system and the respiratory system. The online Medical Dictionary on Dictionary.com allows alphabetical browsing in the combined electronic versions of more than one authoritative medical reference, insuring access to correct spellings, as well as immediate, direct access to a known search term typed into the search box on the site: A medical dictionary reveals that large numbers of medical terms are formed from the same Latin and Greek parts combined and recombined.
- mercury-vapor lamp — a lamp producing a light with a high actinic and ultraviolet content by means of an electric arc in mercury vapor.
- metabolic syndrome — Pathology. a group of medical conditions present simultaneously in a patient, as high blood pressure, low HDL cholesterol levels, and an excess of abdominal fat, that increases a person's risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Also called insulin resistance syndrome.
- methylcyclohexanol — a colorless, aromatic, viscous liquid mixture, chiefly of the ortho and para forms of CH 3 C 6 H 1 0 OH, derived from cresol by hydrogenation: used chiefly as a solvent for rubber, cellulose, esters, and phenols.
- mexican gold poppy — an annual wildflower, Eschscholzia mexicana, having orange-gold, cup-shaped flowers, found in dry, mountainous regions of western North America.
- microcrystallinity — The condition of being microcrystalline.
- micropalaeontology — the branch of palaeontology concerned with the study of microscopic fossils
- military policeman — A military policeman is a member of the military police.
- minority programme — a programme that appeals to a minority of the available audience
- mobile data system — a system consisting of a client computer requesting information and a server supplying this information
- mobility allowance — an allowance paid by the government to help people who have limited mobility
- monetary aggregate — a measure of the money in circulation.
- monophosphorylated — (biochemistry) phosphorylated with a single unit of phosphoric acid.
- montgomery village — a city in central Maryland.
- mountain cranberry — cowberry
- mucopolysaccharide — (formerly) glycosaminoglycan.
- multifunctionality — The condition of being multifunctional.
- muscular dystrophy — a hereditary disease characterized by gradual wasting of the muscles with replacement by scar tissue and fat, sometimes also affecting the heart.
- music to your ears — If something that you hear is music to your ears, it makes you feel very happy.
- mutual aid society — A mutual aid society is an organization that provides benefits or other help to its members when they are affected by things such as death, sickness, disability, old age, or unemployment.
- myeloproliferative — (medicine) of or pertaining to the presence of an abnormal proliferation of myelopoietic cells (from bone marrow).
- neo-pythagoreanism — a philosophical system, established in Alexandria and Rome in the second century b.c., consisting mainly of revived Pythagorean doctrines with elements of Platonism and Stoicism.
- neuroophthalmology — the branch of ophthalmology that deals with the optic nerve and other nervous system structures involved in vision.
- neuropsychodynamic — Of or pertaining to neuropsychodynamics.
- neutrino astronomy — the branch of astronomy dealing with the detection and measurement of neutrinos emitted by the sun and other celestial objects.
- new storage system — (storage) (NSS) A major Multics implementation project during the 1970s. The initial Multics file system design had evolved from the one-huge-disk world of CTSS. When multiple disk units were used they were just assigned increasing ranges of disk addresses, so a segment could have pages scattered over all disks on the system. This provided good I/O parallelism but made crash recovery expensive. NSS redesigned the lower levels of the file system, introducing the concepts of logical volume and physical volume and a mapping from a Multics directory branch to a VTOC entry for each file. The new system had much better recovery performance in exchange for a small space and performance cost.
- nonvolatile memory — computer memory that can retain stored information even when not powered, for example read-only memory
- normally aspirated — A normally aspirated or naturally aspirated engine breathes air at atmospheric pressure.
- numerical taxonomy — classification of organisms by a comparison of large numbers of observable characteristics that are given equal value instead of being weighted according to possible evolutionary significance.
- of your own making — If you say that something such as a problem you have is of your own making, you mean you have caused or created it yourself.
- omega-3 fatty acid — a polyunsaturated fatty acid, essential for normal retinal function, that influences various metabolic pathways, resulting in lowered cholesterol and triglyceride levels, inhibited platelet clotting, and reduced inflammatory and immune reactions.
- ophthalmologically — In an ophthalmological manner.
- ovariohysterectomy — Surgical removal of the ovaries and uterus.
- pathologic anatomy — the branch of pathology dealing with the morphologic changes in tissues.
- people's democracy — (in Communist ideology) a country or form of government in transition from bourgeois democracy to socialism. In this stage there is more than one class, the largest being the proletariat, led by the Communist Party, which is therefore the dominant power
- phantasmagorically — having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination.
- phytohemagglutinin — a lectin, obtained from the red kidney bean, that binds to the membranes of T cells and stimulates metabolic activity, cell division, etc.