21-letter words containing a, c, h, i, t
- certificate authority — (cryptography, body) (CA or "Trusted Third Party") An entity (typically a company) that issues digital certificates to other entities (organisations or individuals) to allow them to prove their identity to others. A Certificate Authority might be an external company such as VeriSign that offers digital certificate services or they might be an internal organisation such as a corporate MIS department. The Certificate Authority's chief function is to verify the identity of entities and issue digital certificates attesting to that identity. The process uses public key cryptography to create a "network of trust". If I want to prove my identity to you, I ask a CA (who you trust to have verified my identity) to encrypt a hash of my signed key with their private key. Then you can use the CA's public key to decrypt the hash and compare it with a hash you calculate yourself. Hashes are used to decrease the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. The hash function must be cryptographically strong, e.g. MD5.
- character recognition — Character recognition is a process which allows computers to recognize written or printed characters such as numbers or letters and to change them into a form that the computer can use.
- characteristic vector — a vector for which there exists a scalar such that the value of the vector under a given transformation is equal to the scalar times the vector.
- charity commissioners — (in Britain) members of a commission constituted to keep a register of charities and control charitable trusts
- cheese and wine party — a party at which cheese and wine are served
- chief master sergeant — a solider of the highest enlisted rank in the US Air Force
- chief warrant officer — a senior-ranking warrant officer in various armed forces
- chinese lantern plant — winter cherry (def 1).
- chinese water torture — a form of torture in which water is made to drip for a long period of time onto a victim's forehead to drive him insane
- chinese-lantern plant — a perennial ground-cherry (Physalis alkekengi) grown for winter bouquets because of the bladderlike red calyx that surrounds its small, tomatolike fruit
- chocolate chip cookie — a biscuit containing chips of chocolate
- christmas decorations — decorations of different kinds appropriate to Christmas, such as tinsel, candles, images of angels, etc.
- christmas tree packet — (networking) (Or kamikaze packet) A packet with every single option set for whatever protocol is in use. The term doubtless derives from a fanciful image of each little option bit being represented by a different-coloured light bulb, all turned on. 10 points for correctly being able to process a "Kamikaze" packet (AKA nastygram, Christmas tree packet, lamp test segment, et al.). That is, correctly handle a segment with the maximum combination of features at once (e.g. a SYN URG PUSH FIN segment with options and data). Compare: Chernobyl packet.
- class-relation method — (programming) A design technique based on the concepts of object-oriented programming and the Entity-Relationship model from the French company Softeam.
- clinical psychologist — a practitioner of clinical psychology
- comfortably-furnished — containing comfortable furniture
- comparative philology — comparative linguistics.
- completing the square — a method, usually of solving quadratic equations, by which a quadratic expression, as x 2 − 4 x + 3, is written as the sum or difference of a perfect square and a constant, x 2 − 4 x + 4 + 3 − 4 = (x − 2) 2 − 1, by addition and subtraction of appropriate constant terms.
- computer architecture — the structure, behaviour, and design of computers
- conditional discharge — If someone who is convicted of an offence is given a conditional discharge by a court, they are not punished unless they later commit a further offence.
- congregational church — any evangelical Protestant Christian Church that is governed according to the principles of Congregationalism. In 1972 the majority of churches in the Congregational Church in England and Wales voted to become part of the United Reformed Church
- constantine the great — (Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus"the Great") a.d. 288?–337, Roman emperor 324–337: named Constantinople as the new capital; legally sanctioned Christian worship.
- consummatory behavior — a behavior pattern that occurs in response to a stimulus and that achieves the satisfaction of a specific drive, as the eating of captured prey by a hungry predator (distinguished from appetitive behavior).
- corporate hospitality — Corporate hospitality is the entertainment that a company offers to its most valued clients, for example by inviting them to sporting events and providing them with food and drink.
- cosmological redshift — the part of the redshift of celestial objects resulting from the expansion of the universe.
- cottony-cushion scale — a small scale insect, Icerya purchasi, that is a pest of citrus trees in California: it is controlled by introducing an Australian ladybird, Rodolia cardinalis, into affected areas
- crude oil dehydration — Crude oil dehydration is the removal of water or water vapor from crude oil, by separating the oil from the water, often in a rotating centrifuge.
- crystallographic axis — one of the imaginary reference lines passing through the center of an ideal crystal, designated a, b, or c.
- dacryocystorhinostomy — A surgical procedure to restore the flow of tears into the nose from the lacrimal sac when the nasolacrimal duct does not function.
- dataflow architecture — a means of arranging computer data processing in which operations are governed by the data present and the processing it requires rather than by a prewritten program that awaits data to be processed
- de-ontological ethics — the branch of ethics dealing with right action and the nature of duty, without regard to the goodness or value of motives or the desirability of the ends of any act.
- denominational school — a school associated with a particular religious denomination
- diapason normal pitch — a standard of pitch in which A above middle C is established at 435 vibrations per second.
- drop the handkerchief — a children's game in which all the players but one stand in a circle facing inward, while that one player stealthily drops a handkerchief behind a player in the circle who must pursue and attempt to catch the one who dropped the handkerchief before the latter reaches the vacated place.
- dynamic data exchange — (language) (DDE, originally Dynamic Data Linking, DDL) A Microsoft Windows 3 hotlink protocol that allows application programs to communicate using a client-server model. Whenever the server (or "publisher") modifies part of a document which is being shared via DDE, one or more clients ("subscribers") are informed and include the modification in the copy of the data on which they are working.
- electromyographically — By means of, or in terms of, electromyography.
- enharmonic modulation — a change of key achieved by regarding a note in one key as an equivalent note in another. Thus E flat in the key of A flat could be regarded as D sharp in the key of B major
- epidemic encephalitis — any type of widespread encephalitis caused by various viruses
- ethics of the fathers — a treatise of the Mishnah that comprises six chapters and consists chiefly of proverbs, aphorisms, and principles of ethics, law, and religion.
- extended architecture — (storage) (XA) A CD-ROM drive specification required by Green Book CD-ROM and White Book CD-ROM formats. Drives labelled "XA ready" may require a firmware upgrade.
- first consonant shift — the consonant shift described by Grimm's law, which distinguishes Germanic languages from other Indo-European languages.
- foreign exchange rate — the rate that specifies how much the currency of a nation is worth in terms of the currency of another nation
- forensic anthropology — the branch of physical anthropology in which anthropological data, criteria, and techniques are used to determine the sex, age, genetic population, or parentage of skeletal or biological materials in questions of civil or criminal law.
- french fried potatoes — a more formal name for chips
- full faith and credit — the obligation under Article IV of the U.S. Constitution for each state to recognize the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.
- gastrohepatic omentum — lesser omentum.
- gram-molecular weight — gram molecule. Abbreviation: GMW.
- greenwich observatory — the national astronomical observatory of Great Britain, housed in a castle in E Sussex; formerly located at Greenwich.
- ground-effect machine — ACV (def 2).
- guaranteed scheduling — (algorithm) A scheduling algorithm used in multitasking operating systems that guarantees fairness by monitoring the amount of CPU time spent by each user and allocating resources accordingly.