21-letter words containing a, c, e, r
- nellis air force base — the largest air base in the U.S. Air Force's Tactical Air Command, located near Las Vegas, Nev., and developed from what began in 1941 as a U.S. Army Air Corps field.
- netware core protocol — (networking) (NCP) A Novell trademark for the protocol used to access Novell NetWare file and print service functions. It uses an underlying IPX or IP transport protocol.
- new general catalogue — NGC.
- non-repeating decimal — a decimal representation of any irrational number, having the property that no sequence of digits is repeated ad infinitum.
- nonexamination course — a course of study in which there are no examinations
- nonproportional cover — Nonproportional cover is reinsurance cover such as excess of loss reinsurance where the reinsurer's liability is not calculated as a proportion of the insurance.
- nonrestrictive clause — a relative clause that describes or supplements but is not essential in establishing the identity of the antecedent and is usually set off by commas in English. In This year, which has been dry, is bad for crops the clause which has been dry is a nonrestrictive clause.
- nonviolent resistance — passive resistance, peaceful protest
- north atlantic treaty — the treaty (1949) signed by 12 countries, providing for the establishment of NATO.
- north pacific current — a warm current flowing eastward across the Pacific Ocean.
- not care a hang about — to not care the least bit about
- nuclear cross section — cross section (def 7).
- nuclear power station — a station or plant where nuclear energy is converted into heat, electricity, etc
- objective correlative — a completely depicted situation or chain of events that objectifies a particular emotion in such a way as to produce or evoke that emotion in the reader.
- oblique circular cone — a cone whose surface is generated by lines joining a fixed point to the points of a circle, the fixed point lying on a line that is not perpendicular to the circle at its center.
- old spanish practices — irregular practices among a group of workers to gain increased financial allowances, reduced working hours, etc
- open graphics library — (graphics, library) (OpenGL) A multi-platform software interface to graphics hardware, supporting rendering and imaging operations. The OpenGL interface was developed by Silicon Graphics, who license it to other vendors. The OpenGL graphics interface consists of several hundred functions operating on 2D and 3D objects, supporting basic techniques, such as modelling and smooth shading, and advanced techniques, such as texture mapping and motion blur. Many operations require a frame buffer. OpenGL is network-transparent, and a common extension to the X Window System allows an OpenGL client to communicate across a network with a different vendor's OpenGL server. OpenGL is based on Silicon Graphics' proprietary IRIS GL.
- open telecom platform — (communications, library) (OTP) A set of standard, open source libraries and tools for use with Erlang.
- open trading protocol — Internet Open Trading Protocol
- operational semantics — (theory) A set of rules specifying how the state of an actual or hypothetical computer changes while executing a program. The overall state is typically divided into a number of components, e.g. stack, heap, registers etc. Each rule specifies certain preconditions on the contents of some components and their new contents after the application of the rule. It is similar in spirit to the notion of a Turing machine, in which actions are precisely described in a mathematical way. Compuare axiomatic semantics, denotational semantics.
- optical double (star) — double star (sense 2)
- orthogonal projection — a two-dimensional graphic representation of an object in which the projecting lines are at right angles to the plane of the projection. Also called orthogonal projection. Compare isometric (def 5).
- orthogonal trajectory — the locus of a point whose path cuts each curve of a family of curves at right angles.
- pacific standard time — See under standard time.
- packed encoding rules — (protocol, standard) (PER) ASN.1 encoding rules for producing a compact transfer syntax for data structures described in ASN.1, defined in 1994. PER provides a much more compact encoding then BER. It tries to represents the data units using the minimum number of bits. The compactness requires that the decoder knows the complete abstract syntax of the data structure to be decoded, however. Documents: ITU-T X.691, ISO 8825-2.
- painter and decorator — a person who paints and decorates houses as a trade
- paper over the cracks — conceal flaws or problems
- paper-white narcissus — a white-flowered variety of Narcissus tazetta, often forced for indoor bloom.
- paradoxical intention — (in psychotherapy) the deliberate practice of a neurotic habit or thought, undertaken in order to remove it
- parametric statistics — the branch of statistics concerned with data measurable on interval or ratio scales, so that arithmetic operations are applicable to them, enabling parameters such as the mean of the distribution to be defined
- partial reinforcement — the process of randomly rewarding an organism for making a response on only some of the occasions it makes it
- partition coefficient — the ratio of the concentrations of a substance in two heterogenous phases in equilibrium with each other
- path coverage testing — (testing) Testing a program by examining which lines of executable code are visited (as in code coverage testing) and also the ways of getting to each line of code and the subsequent sequence of execution. Path coverage testing is the most comprehensive type of testing that a test suite can provide. It can find more bugs, especially those that are caused by data coupling. However, path coverage is hard and usually only used for small and/or critical sections of code.
- pathfinder prospectus — a prospectus regarding the flotation of a new company that contains only sufficient details to test the market reaction
- performance appraisal — the assessment, at regular intervals, of an employee's performance at work
- performance indicator — a quantitative or qualitative measurement, or any other criterion, by which the performance, efficiency, achievement, etc of a person or organization can be assessed, often by comparison with an agreed standard or target
- performance-enhancing — noting or relating to a drug or other substance used to improve one's performance in a sport or other activity requiring strength, stamina, etc.: The use of performance-enhancing steroids by athletes is banned.
- peroxydisulfuric acid — persulfuric acid (def 2).
- person-to-person call — a call to a specified person; if that person cannot take the call there is no charge
- personalized medicine — an approach to the practice of medicine that uses information about a patient’s unique genetic makeup and environment to customize the patient's medical care to fit his or her individual requirements.
- phenarsazine chloride — adamsite.
- philadelphia scrapple — a superior variety of scrapple made with pork shoulder and other cuts of pork rather than with pork scraps.
- phrase structure tree — Linguistics. a structural representation of a sentence in the form of an inverted tree, with each node of the tree labeled according to the phrasal constituent it represents.
- phrase-structure rule — a rule that generates a sentence or other syntactic construction from words and phrases and identifies its constituent structure.
- pick someone's brains — to obtain information or ideas from someone
- picture quality scale — (graphics) (PQS) A system for rating image quality based upon features of images that affect their perception by the human eye, rather than the traditional signal-to-noise ratio which examines differences for every single pixel.
- piero della francesca — Piero della [pee-air-oh del-uh;; Italian pye-raw del-lah] /piˈɛər oʊ ˈdɛl ə;; Italian ˈpyɛ rɔ ˈdɛl lɑ/ (Show IPA), (Piero dei Franceschi) c1420–92, Italian painter.
- piezoelectric ceramic — any ceramic that exhibits piezoelectric properties.
- piezoelectric crystal — a crystal, such as quartz, that produces a potential difference across its opposite faces when under mechanical stress
- pipelined burst cache — Pipeline Burst Cache