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18-letter words containing y, o, i

  • lincoln's birthday — February 12, a legal holiday in some states of the U.S., in honor of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.
  • lipopolysaccharide — any of a class of polysaccharides to which lipids are attached.
  • live by one's wits — the keen perception and cleverly apt expression of those connections between ideas that awaken amusement and pleasure. Synonyms: drollery, facetiousness, waggishness, repartee.
  • locally finite set — a collection of sets in a topological space in which each point of the space has a neighborhood that intersects a finite number of sets of the collection.
  • locked-in syndrome — a condition in which a person is conscious but unable to move any part of the body except the eyes: results from damage to the brainstem
  • logically possible — capable of being described without self-contradiction
  • 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.
  • luminous intensity — the luminous flux in lumens emitted per unit solid angle by a light source, measured in candles.
  • lyophilized powder — Lyophilized powder is a freeze-dried powder.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • melt in your mouth — to require little or no chewing
  • meniere's syndrome — a disease of the labyrinth of the ear, characterized by deafness, ringing in the ears, dizziness, and nausea.
  • 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.
  • methylene chloride — a colorless, volatile liquid, CH 2 Cl 2 , used chiefly as a solvent, as a refrigerant, and as a local anesthetic in dentistry.
  • methylprednisolone — A synthetic glucocorticoid drug, with chemical formula C22H30O5.
  • 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 president — (in the US) a president who has been elected by the largest number of votes cast but not by a majority of the electorate
  • 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
  • money is no object — If you say that money is no object or distance is no object, you are emphasizing that you are willing or able to spend as much money as necessary or travel whatever distance is required.
  • money of necessity — temporary coinage, as siege pieces, issued in areas where regular coinage is unavailable: sometimes of unusual materials, as leather or wood.
  • monochlorobiphenyl — (organic compound) Either of three isomers of a chlorinated derivative of biphenyl containing one chlorine atom.
  • montgomery village — a city in central Maryland.
  • moog (synthesizer) — an early musical synthesizer
  • mountain cranberry — cowberry
  • mucopolysaccharide — (formerly) glycosaminoglycan.
  • multifunctionality — The condition of being multifunctional.
  • multiply-connected — connected but not simply-connected.
  • 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).
  • natural philosophy — natural science.
  • nebular hypothesis — the theory that the solar system evolved from a mass of nebular matter: prominent in the 19th century following its precise formulation by Laplace.
  • 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.
  • neuroendocrinology — the study of the anatomical and physiological interactions between the nervous and endocrine systems.
  • neurophysiological — the branch of physiology dealing with the functions of the nervous system.
  • neuropsychodynamic — Of or pertaining to neuropsychodynamics.
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