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22-letter words containing is

  • isthmus of tehuantepec — the narrowest part of S Mexico, with the Bay of Campeche on the north coast and the Gulf of Tehuantepec (an inlet of the Pacific) on the south coast
  • juan fernández islands — a group of three islands in the S Pacific Ocean, administered by Chile: volcanic and wooded. Area: about 180 sq km (70 sq miles)
  • lake isle of innisfree — a poem (1893) by W. B. Yeats.
  • land of the rising sun — Japan.
  • last call optimisation — (programming)   (Or "tail call optimisation") Discarding the immediate calling context (call stack frame) when the last action of a function or procedure, A, is to call another function or procedure, B. B will then return directly to A's caller, or possibly further up the call stack if the optimisation has been applied to several consecutive calls. Last call optimisation allows arbitrarily deep nesting of procedure calls without consuming memory to store useless environments. This is particularly useful in the special case of tail recursion optimisation, where a procedure's last action is to call itself (possibly indirectly).
  • lesser spotted dogfish — a small spotted European shark, Scyliorhinus caniculus
  • lethargic encephalitis — sleeping sickness (def 2).
  • liquid crystal display — (hardware)   (LCD) An electro-optical device used to display digits, characters or images, commonly used in digital watches, calculators, and portable computers. The heart of the liquid crystal display is a piece of liquid crystal material placed between a pair of transparent electrodes. The liquid crystal changes the phase of the light passing through it and this phase change can be controlled by the voltage applied between the electrodes. If such a unit is placed between a pair of plane polariser plates then light can pass through it only if the correct voltage is applied. Liquid crystal displays are formed by integrating a number of such cells, or more usually, by using a single liquid crystal plate and a pattern of electrodes. The simplest kind of liquid crystal displays, those used in digital watches and calculators, contain a common electrode plane covering one side and a pattern of electrodes on the other. These electrodes can be individually controlled to produce the appropriate display. Computer displays, however, require far too many pixels (typically between 50,000 and several millions) to make this scheme, in particular its wiring, feasible. The electrodes are therefore replaced by a number of row electrodes on one side and column electrodes on the other. By applying voltage to one row and several columns the pixels at the intersections are set. The pixels being set one row after the other, in passive matrix displays the number of rows is limited by the ratio of the setting and fading times. In the setup described above (known as "twisted nematic") the number of rows is limited to about 20. Using an alternative "supertwisted nematic" setup VGA quality displays (480 rows) can be easily built. As of 1995 most notebook computers used this technique. Fading can be slowed by putting an active element, such as a transistor, on the top of each pixel. This "remembers" the setting of that pixel. These active matrix displays are of much better quality (as good as CRTs) but are much more expensive than the passive matrix displays. LCDs are slimmer, lighter and consume less power than the previous dominant display type, the cathode ray tube, hence their importance for portable computers.
  • lord high commissioner — the Queen's representative
  • methyl isobutyl ketone — a colorless, slightly water-soluble, flammable liquid, C 6 H 1 2 O, having a pleasant odor: used as a solvent for nitrocellulose, gums, resins, fats, waxes, and oils.
  • middle-distance runner — someone who runs races of a length between the sprints and the distance events, esp the 800 metres and the 1500 metres
  • miscarriage of justice — law: wrongful judgement
  • miscellaneous expenses — small expenses of various kinds
  • missing persons bureau — the part of the Police Force dealing with tracing missing people
  • mistress of ceremonies — a woman who directs the entertainment at a party, dinner, or the like.
  • molecular distillation — a vacuum distillation in which the molecules of the distillate reach the condenser before colliding with one another.
  • monday morning disease — azoturia (def 2).
  • nonrepresentationalism — not resembling or portraying any object in physical nature: a nonrepresentational painting.
  • nonspecific urethritis — nongonococcal urethritis.
  • occupational therapist — professional who assists with rehabilitation
  • paracoccidioidomycosis — a chronic infection caused by the fungus Paracoccidioides brasiliensis, occurring in Mexico and in Central and South America, characterized by mouth and throat ulcers, weight loss, and lesions on the skin, intestines, and genitals.
  • parker morris standard — (in Britain) a set of minimum criteria for good housing construction, design, and facilities, recommended by the 1961 report of the Central Housing Advisory Committee chaired by Sir Parker Morris. Subsequent governments have urged private and local authority house-builders to achieve these standards
  • passive matrix display — (hardware)   A type of liquid crystal display which relies on persistence to maintain the state of each display element (pixel) between refresh scans. The resolution of such displays is limited by the ratio between the time to set a pixel and the time it takes to fade. Contrast active matrix display.
  • philosophical analysis — linguistic analysis.
  • planetary transmission — A planetary transmission is a special form of geared drive in which the input and output shafts are on the same axis.
  • pneumocystis pneumonia — a pulmonary infection caused by the protozoan Pneumocystis carinii, occurring as an opportunistic disease in persons with impaired immune systems, as AIDS victims. Abbreviation: PCP.
  • portable standard lisp — (language)   (PSL) A dialect of Lisp from Utah University. PSL is available as a kit for 68000 and also runs on VAX. It compiles Lisp to C-code virtual machine language.
  • preestablished harmony — (in the philosophy of Leibnitz) synchronous operation of all monads, since their simultaneous creation, in accordance with the preexisting plan of God.
  • prince edward islander — a native or inhabitant of Prince Edward Island
  • prince of wales island — the largest island in the Alexander Archipelago, in SE Alaska. 1500 sq. mi. (3990 sq. km).
  • prisoner of conscience — sb imprisoned for beliefs
  • probationary assistant — a teacher in the first probationary years
  • pulmonary tuberculosis — tuberculosis of the lungs.
  • pushing up the daisies — dead and buried
  • queen's bench division — (in England when the sovereign is female) one of the divisions of the High Court of Justice
  • recreational therapist — someone who specializes in therapy by means of recreational activities engaged in by the patient
  • registered shareholder — someone who holds or owns a stock registered to their name
  • replacement cost basis — Replacement cost basis is a method of valuing insured property in which the cost of replacing property is calculated without a reduction for depreciation.
  • reproductive isolation — the conditions, as physiological or behavioral differences or geographical barriers, that prevent potentially interbreeding populations from cross-fertilization.
  • research establishment — an establishment or institution where research or investigation into a subject, topic, etc, can be conducted
  • resistance thermometer — an instrument for measuring the temperature of a metal, utilizing the principle that the electrical resistance of the metal varies with the temperature.
  • reverse discrimination — the unfair treatment of members of majority groups resulting from preferential policies, as in college admissions or employment, intended to remedy earlier discrimination against minorities.
  • rheumatoid spondylitis — ankylosing spondylitis.
  • round-table discussion — a discussion held at a meeting of parties or people on equal terms
  • rural district council — (in England and Wales from 1888 to 1974 and Northern Ireland from 1898 to 1973) a group of people elected to govern a rural division of a county
  • 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.
  • satisfiability problem — A problem used as an example in complexity theory. It can be stated thus: Given a Boolean expression E, decide if there is some assignment to the variables in E such that E is true. A Boolean expression is composed of Boolean variables, (logical) negation (NOT), (logical) conjunction (AND) and parentheses for grouping. The satisfiability problem was the first problem to be proved to be NP-complete (by Cook).
  • sb can whistle for sth — If you say that someone can whistle for a particular thing, you mean that you are not willing or able to give it to them.
  • 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.
  • scientific creationism — the belief that the account of creation in the early chapters of Genesis is scientifically as well as religiously valid and that it can be supported by scientific evidence apart from scriptural authority.
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