18-letter words containing a, c, e, s, p
- chagos archipelago — group of islands in the Indian Ocean 1,180 mi (1,899 km) northeast of Mauritius, comprising the British Indian Ocean Territory: chief island, Diego Garcia
- change one's spots — to reform one's character
- character graphics — ASCII art
- christine de pisan — ?1364–?1430, French poet and prose writer, born in Venice. Her works include ballads, rondeaux, lays, and a biography of Charles V of France
- citizenship papers — the document stating that a naturalized person has been formally declared a citizen
- clean up one's act — to start to behave in a responsible manner
- cleopatra's needle — either of two Egyptian obelisks, originally set up at Heliopolis about 1500 bc: one was moved to the Thames Embankment, London, in 1878, the other to Central Park, New York, in 1880
- closed corporation — a corporation the stock of which is owned by a small number of persons and is rarely traded on the open market
- closed scholarship — a scholarship for which only certain people, such as those from a particular school or with a particular surname, are eligible
- cock-a-leekie soup — a soup made from a fowl boiled with leeks
- color transparency — a positive color image photographically produced on transparent film or glass and viewed by transmitted light, usually by projection.
- compact video disc — a compact laser disc that plays both pictures and sound
- comparison shopper — an employee of a retail store hired to visit competing stores in order to gather information regarding styles, quality, prices, etc., of merchandise offered by competitors.
- compassion fatigue — the inability to react sympathetically to a crisis, disaster, etc, because of overexposure to previous crises, disasters, etc
- compassionlessness — The quality, state, or condition of being compassionless; uncompassion.
- compensation award — an amount of money awarded as compensation in a court case
- compensation order — (in Britain) the requirement of a court that an offender pay compensation for injury, loss, or damage resulting from an offence, either in preference to or as well as a fine
- compensation point — the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide at which the rate of carbon dioxide uptake by a photosynthesizing plant is exactly balanced by its rate of carbon dioxide release in respiration and photorespiration
- complementarianism — The doctrine that genders in a society should have complementary roles.
- complementary base — either of the nucleotide bases linked by a hydrogen bond on opposite strands of DNA or double-stranded RNA: guanine is the complementary base of cytosine, and adenine is the complementary base of thymine in DNA and of uracil in RNA.
- complexity measure — (algorithm) A quantity describing the complexity of a computation.
- compressor program — a computer program that compresses data
- compressor station — A compressor station is a facility with several compressors (= devices that increase the pressure of air or natural gas) and other equipment to pump natural gas under pressure over long distances.
- concentration span — the length of time a person can concentrate on something
- conceptual realism — the doctrine that universals have real and independent existence.
- conceptualisations — Plural form of conceptualisation.
- conceptualizations — Plural form of conceptualization.
- condensation point — a point of which every neighborhood contains an uncountable number of points of a given set.
- connected subgraph — (mathematics) A connected graph consisting of a subset of the nodes and edges of some other graph.
- conservative party — The Conservative Party is the main right-of-centre party in Britain.
- constituency party — a branch of a political party operating within a constituency
- construction paper — Construction paper is a type of stiff, colored paper that children use for drawing and for making things.
- conversation piece — something, esp an unusual object, that provokes conversation
- cornucopian thesis — the belief that, as long as science and technology continue to advance, growth can continue for ever because these new advances create new resources
- corpuscular theory — the theory, originally proposed by Newton, and revived with the development of the quantum theory, that light consists of a stream of particles
- correspondent bank — A correspondent bank is a bank that provides services such as accepting deposits for another bank.
- costume department — the department in a theatre or television company that is responsible for actors' costumes
- cranial osteopathy — osteopathy that focuses on the cranium and the spine
- creatine phosphate — phosphocreatine.
- creeping featurism — (jargon) /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ (Or "feature creep") A systematic tendency to load more chrome and features onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed. "The main problem with BSD Unix has always been creeping featurism." More generally, creeping featurism is the tendency for anything to become more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had this feature too". The result is usually a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone, and then another, and another, .... When creeping featurism gets out of hand, it's like a cancer. Usually this term is used to describe computer programs, but it could also be said of the federal government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A similar phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious redesigns; see second-system effect. See also creeping elegance.
- creeping paralysis — any slow process that causes a system, government, etc, to stop working efficiently
- crookes dark space — the dark space between the cathode glow and the negative glow in a vacuum tube, occurring when the pressure is low.
- crystal microphone — a microphone that uses a piezoelectric crystal to convert sound energy into electrical energy
- curvature of space — (in relativity) a property of space near massive bodies in which their gravitational field causes light to travel along curved paths.
- depth-first search — (algorithm) A graph search algorithm which extends the current path as far as possible before backtracking to the last choice point and trying the next alternative path. Depth-first search may fail to find a solution if it enters a cycle in the graph. This can be avoided if we never extend a path to a node which it already contains. Opposite of breadth first search. See also iterative deepening.
- descriptive 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.
- dialytic telescope — a type of achromatic telescope with a second correcting lens
- diphosphoglycerate — an ester of phosphoric acid and glyceric acid that occurs in the blood and that promotes the release of hemoglobin-bound oxygen.
- diplomatic service — diplomatic corps
- diplomatic shuttle — a series of diplomatic visits to other states made by an official, such as an ambassador or envoy