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22-letter words containing y, h

  • otorhinolaryngological — of or relating to the medical practice involving the ear, nose, and throat.
  • ousterhout's dichotomy — (language)   John Ousterhout's division of high-level languages into "system programming languages" and "scripting languages". This distinction underlies the design of his language Tcl. System programming languages (or "applications languages") are strongly typed, allow arbitrarily complex data structures, and programs in them are compiled, and are meant to operate largely independently of other programs. Prototypical system programming languages are C and Modula-2. By contrast, scripting languages (or "glue languages") are weakly typed or untyped, have little or no provision for complex data structures, and programs in them ("scripts") are interpreted. Scripts need to interact either with other programs (often as glue) or with a set of functions provided by the interpreter, as with the file system functions provided in a UNIX shell and with Tcl's GUI functions. Prototypical scripting languages are AppleScript, C Shell, MS-DOS batch files and Tcl. Many believe that this is a highly arbitrary dichotomy, and refer to it as "Ousterhout's fallacy" or "Ousterhout's false dichotomy". While strong-versus-weak typing, data structure complexity, and independent versus stand-alone might be said to be unrelated features, the usual critique of Ousterhout's dichotomy is of its distinction of compilation versus interpretation, since neither semantics nor syntax depend significantly on whether code is compiled into machine-language, interpreted, tokenized, or byte-compiled at the start of each run, or any mixture of these. Many languages fall between being interpreted or compiled (e.g. Lisp, Forth, UCSD Pascal, Perl, and Java). This makes compilation versus interpretation a dubious parameter in a taxonomy of programming languages.
  • paroxysmal tachycardia — tachycardia that begins and subsides suddenly.
  • philosophical analysis — linguistic analysis.
  • physiographic province — a geographic region in which climate and geology have given rise to an array of landforms different from those of surrounding regions.
  • play into the hands of — a dramatic composition or piece; drama.
  • play one's cards right — a usually rectangular piece of stiff paper, thin pasteboard, or plastic for various uses, as to write information on or printed as a means of identifying the holder: a 3″ × 5″ file card; a membership card.
  • polymyalgia rheumatica — a chronic inflammatory disease, common among older persons, characterized by recurrent episodes of muscle pain and stiffness, sometimes leading to cardiovascular complications or blindness.
  • preestablished harmony — (in the philosophy of Leibnitz) synchronous operation of all monads, since their simultaneous creation, in accordance with the preexisting plan of God.
  • process cinematography — cinematography in which the main or foreground action or scene is superimposed on or combined with simulated or separately filmed background action or scenery to produce special visual effects.
  • prothonotary apostolic — a member of the first college of prelates of the Roman Curia.
  • psychological thriller — book, movie: suspense story
  • quantum chromodynamics — a quantum field theory that describes quarks and gluons and their interactions, with the color of the quarks playing a role analogous to that of electric charge. Abbreviation: QCD. Also called chromodynamics. Compare color (def 18).
  • request for technology — (RFT) The process established by the OSF to get proposals for new standards.
  • research systems, inc. — (RSI) Distributors of Interactive Data Language (IDL).
  • rheumatoid spondylitis — ankylosing spondylitis.
  • rocky mountain bighorn — bighorn.
  • royal national theatre — a theatre complex in London, on the S bank of the Thames (opened 1976). The prefix Royal was added in 1988. It houses the Royal National Theatre Company
  • sapir-whorf hypothesis — a theory developed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf that states that the structure of a language determines or greatly influences the modes of thought and behavior characteristic of the culture in which it is spoken.
  • saturday night special — a cheap, small-caliber handgun that is easily obtainable and concealable.
  • saturday-night special — a cheap, small-caliber handgun that is easily obtainable and concealable.
  • schachter's hypothesis — (web)   The observation that "Given two unrelated technical terms, an Internet search engine will retrieve only résumés". This was first formulated by Joshua Eli Schachter in about 1998, while poring over the uniformly irrelevant pages that resulted from a search he'd run on "+Perl +MAPI" in Altavista.
  • secretary to the board — the secretary to the board of directors; company secretary
  • see the light (of day) — to come into existence
  • seventh-day adventists — See example at Seventh-Day.
  • southern redbelly dace — any of the small, brightly colored North American freshwater cyprinids, especially Phoxinus oreas (northern redbelly dace) and P. erythrogaster (southern redbelly dace)
  • specific heat capacity — the heat required to raise unit mass of a substance by unit temperature interval under specified conditions, such as constant pressure: usually measured in joules per kelvin per kilogram
  • spectrophotometrically — an instrument for making photometric comparisons between parts of spectra.
  • speculative philosophy — philosophy embodying beliefs insusceptible of proof and attempting to gain insight into the nature of the ultimate by intuitive or a priori means.
  • spherical trigonometry — the branch of trigonometry that deals with spherical triangles.
  • suffice it to say that — let us say no more than that; I shall just say that
  • sweet william catchfly — a southern European plant, Silene armeria, of the pink family, having a flat-topped cluster of pink flowers.
  • sympathetic ophthalmia — inflammation of one eye due to injury or disease of the other eye.
  • synchronic linguistics — the branch of linguistics that analyzes the structure of a language or languages as static, at a given point in their history
  • take a fancy to sb/sth — If you take a fancy to someone or something, you start liking them, usually for no understandable reason.
  • take one's breath away — the air inhaled and exhaled in respiration.
  • take the mickey out of — to deflate (a person)
  • that is/that is to say — You use that is or that is to say to indicate that you are about to express the same idea more clearly or precisely.
  • the catcher in the rye — a novel (1951) by J. D. Salinger.
  • the continental system — Napoleon's plan in 1806 to blockade Britain by excluding her ships from ports on the mainland of Europe
  • the emergency services — the public organizations whose job is to take quick action to deal with emergencies when they occur, especially the fire brigade, the police, and the ambulance service
  • the end of your tether — If you say that you are at the end of your tether, you mean that you are so worried, tired, and unhappy because of your problems that you feel you cannot cope.
  • the green-eyed monster — jealousy or envy
  • the mythical man-month — (publication)   Fred Brooks's excellent 1975 book on software engineering. See also Brooks's Law.
  • the nature conservancy — a US charitable environmental organization, founded in 1951, that works to preserve the plants, animals, and natural communities by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive
  • the pennsylvania dutch — a group of German-speaking people in E Pennsylvania, descended from 18th-century settlers from SW Germany and Switzerland
  • the same/the very same — You say 'the same' or 'the very same' in reply to someone's question when you are saying that they have identified a person or thing correctly.
  • thermal imaging system — equipment providing images of a target, or of a person or thing under examination
  • thiamine-hydrochloride — a white, crystalline, water-soluble compound of the vitamin-B complex, containing a thiazole and a pyrimidine group, C 12 H 17 ClN 4 OS, essential for normal functioning of the nervous system, a deficiency of which results chiefly in beriberi and other nerve disorders: occurring in many natural sources, as green peas, liver, and especially the seed coats of cereal grains, the commercial product of which is chiefly synthesized in the form of its chloride (thiamine chloride or thiamine hydrochloride) for therapeutic administration, or in nitrate form (thiamine mononitrate) for enriching flour mixes.
  • through someone's eyes — If someone sees or considers something through your eyes, they consider it in the way that you do, from your point of view.
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