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16-letter words containing a, c, e, y

  • black-eyed susan — any of several North American plants of the genus Rudbeckia, esp R. hirta, having flower heads of orange-yellow rays and brown-black centres: family Asteraceae (composites)
  • black-letter day — an unlucky or tragic day.
  • buckley's chance — no chance at all
  • buckwheat family — the plant family Polygonaceae, characterized by herbaceous plants, vines, shrubs, and trees having stems with swollen joints, simple leaves, small, petalless flowers, and fruit in the form of an achene, and including the buckwheat, dock, knotweed, rhubarb, sea grape, and smartweed.
  • buoyancy chamber — an enclosed section of a canoe, float, ship or other object that contains air, foam, or another buoyant substance in order to help maintain buoyancy
  • bureaucratically — of, relating to, or characteristic of a bureaucrat or a bureaucracy; arbitrary and routine.
  • bury the hatchet — to cease hostilities and become reconciled
  • buttercup family — the plant family Ranunculaceae, typified by mostly herbaceous plants having usually alternate leaves, multistaminate flowers sometimes lacking petals but with colorful sepals, and including the anemone, buttercup, clematis, columbine, delphinium, and monkshood.
  • byzantine church — Orthodox Church (def 1).
  • cabbage root fly — a dipterous fly, Erioischia brassicae, whose larvae feed on the roots and stems of cabbages and other brassicas: family Muscidae (houseflies, etc)
  • calorimetrically — In a calorimetric manner.
  • can you beat it? — an expression of utter amazement or surprise
  • canada mayflower — a small wildflower (Maianthemum canadense) of the lily family, with white flowers and red, beadlike berries, found in the N U.S. and in Canada; bead-ruby
  • canterbury bells — a cultivated bellflower (Campanula medium) with white, pink, or blue cuplike flowers
  • canterbury tales — an unfinished literary work by Chaucer, largely in verse, consisting of stories told by pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury
  • canyon de chelly — a canyon in NE Arizona, in the Navajo reservation: site contains prehistoric cliff dwellings.
  • cape may warbler — a North American wood warbler, Dendroica tigrina, olive-green striped with black on the wings and back and yellow striped with black on the breast.
  • capital employed — the money used by a business for buying land, buildings, equipment etc
  • carboxylesterase — (enzyme) Any enzyme that catalyses the hydrolysis of a carboxylic ester.
  • carboxypeptidase — any of several digestive enzymes that catalyze the removal of an amino acid from the end of a peptide chain having a free carbonyl group.
  • carry-on luggage — luggage that is taken inside an aircraft by hand personally by a passenger
  • cartridge player — an audio or video system that reads cartridges of magnetic tape
  • caryophyllaceous — of, relating to, or belonging to the Caryophyllaceae, a family of flowering plants including the pink, carnation, sweet william, and chickweed
  • case sensitivity — (text)   Whether a text matching operation distinguishes upper-case (capital) letters from lower case (is "case sensitive") or not ("case insensitive"). Case in file names should be preserved (for readability) but ignored when matching (so the user doesn't have to get it right). MS-DOS does not preserve case in file names, Unix preserves case and matches are case sensitive. Any decent text editor will allow the user to specify whether or not text searches should be case sensitive. Case sensitivity is also relevant in programming (most programming languages distiguish between case in the names of identifiers), and addressing (Internet domain names are case insensitive but RFC 822 local mailbox names are case sensitive). Case insensitive operations are sometimes said to "fold case", from the idea of folding the character code table so that upper and lower case letters coincide. The alternative "smash case" is more likely to be used by someone who considers this behaviour a misfeature or in cases where one case is actually permanently converted to the other. "MS-DOS will automatically smash case in the names of all the files you create".
  • cash on delivery — If you pay for goods cash on delivery, you pay for them in cash when they are delivered. The abbreviation C.O.D. is also used.
  • cashless society — a society in which purchases of goods or services are made by credit card or electronic funds transferral rather than with cash or checks.
  • catachrestically — In a catachrestic way.
  • category listing — A category listing is a list of different product categories such as menswear, womenswear, and childrenswear.
  • category mistake — a sentence that says of something in one category what can only intelligibly be said of something in another, as when speaking of the mind located in space
  • category planner — A category planner is a person whose job to plan and co-ordinate future inventory and sales volume in one or more product categories.
  • cathode ray tube — (hardware)   (CRT) An electrical device for displaying images by exciting phosphor dots with a scanned electron beam. CRTs are found in computer VDUs and monitors, televisions and oscilloscopes. The first commercially practical CRT was perfected on 29 January 1901 by Allen B DuMont. A large glass envelope containing a negative electrode (the cathode) emits electrons (formerly called "cathode rays") when heated, as in a vacuum tube. The electrons are accelerated across a large voltage gradient toward the flat surface of the tube (the screen) which is covered with phosphor. When an electron strikes the phosphor, light is emitted. The electron beam is deflected by electromagnetic coils around the outside of the tube so that it scans across the screen, usually in horizontal stripes. This scan pattern is known as a raster. By controlling the current in the beam, the brightness at any particular point (roughly a "pixel") can be varied. Different phosphors have different "persistence" - the length of time for which they glow after being struck by electrons. If the scanning is done fast enough, the eye sees a steady image, due to both the persistence of the phospor and of the eye itself. CRTs also differ in their dot pitch, which determines their spatial resolution, and in whether they use interlace or not.
  • cathode-ray tube — A cathode-ray tube is a device in televisions and computer terminals which sends an image onto the screen.
  • cavity resonator — a conducting surface enclosing a space in which an oscillating electromagnetic field can be maintained, the dimensions of the cavity determining the resonant frequency of the oscillations. It is used in microwave devices for frequencies exceeding 300 megahertz
  • cayenne (pepper) — a very hot, reddish condiment made from various capsicums
  • cayenne software — (company)   The company formed when CADRE merged with Bachman Information Systems in July 1996.
  • celebrity status — the prominence of film star, footballer, musician etc who is constantly photographed and written about in tabloids and magazines
  • central cylinder — stele (def 4).
  • central tendency — the tendency of the values of a random variable to cluster around the mean, median, and mode
  • centrally heated — A centrally heated building or room has central heating.
  • cervera y topete — Pascual [pahs-kwahl] /pɑsˈkwɑl/ (Show IPA), 1839–1909, Spanish admiral.
  • character comedy — comedy, or a comedy, in which the main source of humour is in the character of the people represented in it
  • chemoprophylaxis — the prevention of disease using chemical drugs
  • chernobyl packet — (networking)   /cher-noh'b*l pak'*t/ A network packet that induces a broadcast storm and/or network meltdown, named in memory of the April 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine. The typical scenario involves an IP Ethernet datagram that passes through a gateway with both source and destination Ethernet address and IP address set as the respective broadcast addresses for the subnetworks being gated between. Compare Christmas tree packet.
  • chiclet keyboard — (hardware, abuse)   A keyboard with a small, flat rectangular or lozenge-shaped rubber or plastic keys that look like pieces of Chiclets chewing gum. Used especially to describe the original IBM PCjr keyboard. Vendors unanimously liked these because they were cheap, and a lot of early portable and laptop computers were launched with them. Customers rejected the idea with almost equal unanimity, and chiclets are not often seen on anything larger than a digital watch any more.
  • cholecystography — radiography of the gall bladder after administration of a contrast medium
  • chryselephantine — (of ancient Greek statues) made of or overlaid with gold and ivory
  • cinnamyl acetate — a colorless liquid, C 11 H 12 O 2 , having a piquant, flowerlike odor: used as a fixative in the manufacture of perfumes.
  • circuit analyzer — multimeter.
  • city of aberdeen — a council area in NE Scotland, established in 1996. Pop: 206 600 (2003 est). Area: 186 sq km (72 sq miles)
  • cladogenetically — By means of cladogenesis.
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