18-letter words containing a, c, e
- celestial latitude — the angular distance of a celestial body north or south from the ecliptic
- celestial marriage — the rite or state of marriage, performed in a Mormon temple by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and believed to continue beyond death.
- cellular automaton — (algorithm, parallel) (CA, plural "- automata") A regular spatial lattice of "cells", each of which can have any one of a finite number of states. The state of all cells in the lattice are updated simultaneously and the state of the entire lattice advances in discrete time steps. The state of each cell in the lattice is updated according to a local rule which may depend on the state of the cell and its neighbors at the previous time step. Each cell in a cellular automaton could be considered to be a finite state machine which takes its neighbours' states as input and outputs its own state. The best known example is J.H. Conway's game of Life.
- cellular telephone — a mobile phone
- central government — the government of a state or country
- central projection — a projection of one plane onto a second plane such that a point on the first plane and its image on the second plane lie on a straight line through a fixed point not on either plane.
- centralized school — a public school formed from the pupils and teachers of a number of discontinued smaller schools, especially in a rural district.
- centrifugal clutch — an automatic clutch in which the friction surfaces are engaged by weighted levers acting under centrifugal force at a certain speed of rotation
- centum call second — (unit) (CCS) A unit used (in North America) to quantify the total traffic running in a network. 1 CCS is 100 call-seconds. That means 1 CCS could be 2 calls of 50 seconds duration or 20 calls of 5 seconds duration.
- cepheid (variable) — any of a class of pulsating, yellow, supergiant stars whose brightness varies in regular periods: from the period-luminosity relation, the distance of such a star can be determined
- cereal leaf beetle — an Old World leaf beetle, Oulema melanopus, introduced into North America in 1962: a serious pest of small grains, especially oats and cereal grasses.
- cerebral dominance — the normal tendency for one half of the brain, usually the left cerebral hemisphere in right-handed people, to exercise more control over certain functions (e.g. handedness and language) than the other
- cerenkov radiation — radiation emitted when a charged particle travels through a medium at a speed greater than the speed of light through that medium
- certification mark — a mark that certifies the origin, material, quality, mode of manufacture, accuracy, or other characteristic of a product or service: “UL” is a certification mark for appliances meeting the safety standards of Underwriters Laboratories, Inc.
- cervical screening — a screening for cervical cancer
- cesarean (section) — a surgical operation for delivering a baby by cutting through the mother's abdominal and uterine walls
- 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
- chamber of horrors — a room, for example in a waxworks, containing objects, images or representations of people or scenes that are believed likely to frighten or horrify visitors
- chambered nautilus — nautilus (def 1).
- chandelier earring — one of a pair of long and ornate earrings that dangle from the earlobes, usually dropping from more than one level.
- change one's spots — to reform one's character
- change the subject — to select a new topic of conversation
- changement de pied — a jump in which the dancer's feet are reversed from the starting position.
- character disorder — a disorder characterized by socially undesirable behavior, as poor control of impulses or inability to maintain close emotional relationships, and by absence of anxiety or guilt.
- character encoding — (character) (Or "character encoding scheme") A mapping between binary data values and character code positions (or "code points"). Early systems stored characters in a variety of ways, e.g. four six-bit characters in a 24-bit word, but around 1960, eight-bit bytes started to become the most common data storage layout, with each character stored in one byte, typically in the ASCII character set. In the case of ASCII, the character encoding is an identity mapping: code position 65 maps to the byte value 65. This is possible because ASCII uses only code positions representable as single bytes, i.e., values between 0 and 255. (US-ASCII only uses values 0 to 127, in fact.) From the late 1990s, there was increased use of larger character sets such as Unicode and many CJK coded character sets. These can represent characters from many languages and more symbols.
- character graphics — ASCII art
- character-building — improving certain good or useful traits in a person's character, esp self-reliance, endurance, and courage
- characteristically — Also, characteristical. pertaining to, constituting, or indicating the character or peculiar quality of a person or thing; typical; distinctive: Red and gold are the characteristic colors of autumn.
- charge conjugation — the mathematical operation of replacing every elementary particle by its antiparticle. Symbol: C.
- charge of quarters — a member of the armed forces who handles administration in his or her unit, esp after duty hours
- chartered engineer — (in Britain) an engineer who is registered with the Engineering Council as having the scientific and technical knowledge and practical experience to satisfy its professional requirements
- chartered surveyor — (in Britain) a surveyor who is registered with the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors as having the qualifications, training, and experience to satisfy their professional requirements
- chattering classes — The chattering classes are people such as journalists, broadcasters, or public figures who comment on events but have little or no influence over them.
- chebyshev equation — Tchebycheff equation.
- check verification — Check verification is a system that checks national databases of information about individuals to make sure that checks will be honored and fraud is not being committed.
- checkpoint charlie — a crossing between East and West Berlin during the Cold War
- chemical machining — the shaping of a metal part by controlled removal of unwanted metal by a flow of chemical solutions
- chemical potential — a thermodynamic function of a substance in a system that is the partial differential of the Gibbs function of the system with respect to the number of moles of the substance
- chemical pregnancy — a pregnancy that is confirmed by a pregnancy test but not by clinical signs and terminates before clinical signs can be observed.
- cheval de bataille — a horse used in battle; charger.
- chew someone's ear — to reprimand severely
- chicken tetrazzini — diced chicken in a cream sauce, baked in a casserole with noodles and cheese, usually flavored with sherry.
- chickenheartedness — Alternative form of chicken-heartedness.
- children of israel — the Jews; Hebrews
- children's crusade — a crusade to recover Jerusalem from the Saracens, undertaken in 1212 by thousands of French and German children who perished, were sold into slavery, or were turned back.
- chinese water deer — a small Chinese or Korean deer, Hydropotes inermis, having tusks and no antlers: introduced into England and France
- chinese watermelon — a tropical Asian vine, Benincasa hispida, of the gourd family, having a brown, hairy stem, large, solitary, yellow flowers, and white, melonlike fruit.
- chloroacetophenone — a white, crystalline, water-insoluble, poisonous solid, C 8 H 7 ClO, used in solution as a tear gas. Abbreviation: CN.
- chlorobromomethane — a clear, colorless, volatile, nonflammable liquid, CH 2 ClBr, used chiefly as an extinguishing agent in fire extinguishers and as a solvent in organic synthesis.
- chocolate-coloured — dark brown