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21-letter words containing a, c, i, e

  • convertible insurance — any form of life or health insurance, either individual or group, that enables the insured to change or convert the insurance to another form, as term to whole life insurance or group to individual health insurance.
  • conway's game of life — (simulation)   The first popular cellular automata based artificial life simulation. Life was invented by British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970 and was first introduced publicly in "Scientific American" later that year. Conway first devised what he called "The Game of Life" and "ran" it using plates placed on floor tiles in his house. Because of he ran out of floor space and kept stepping on the plates, he later moved to doing it on paper or on a checkerboard and then moved to running Life as a computer program on a PDP-7. That first implementation of Life as a computer program was written by M. J. T. Guy and S. R. Bourne (the author of Unix's Bourne shell). Life uses a rectangular grid of binary (live or dead) cells each of which is updated at each step according to the previous state of its eight neighbours as follows: a live cell with less than two, or more than three, live neighbours dies. A dead cell with exactly three neighbours becomes alive. Other cells do not change. While the rules are fairly simple, the patterns that can arise are of a complexity resembling that of organic systems -- hence the name "Life". Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with Life, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented Life in TECO!; see Gosperism). When a hacker mentions "life", he is more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, the 1950s-era board game or the human state of existence.
  • cooperative apartment — a block of flats belonging to a corporation in which shares are owned in proportion to the relative value of the flat occupied
  • cooperative-apartment — working or acting together willingly for a common purpose or benefit.
  • coordination language — (networking, protocol)   A language defined specifically to allow two or more parties (components) to communicate in order to accomplish some shared goal. Examples of coordination languages are Linda and Xerox's CLF (STITCH).
  • coquilles st. jacques — an appetizer of minced scallops in a wine and cream sauce topped with grated cheese and browned under a broiler: usually served in scallop shells.
  • cordillera occidental — the western coastal ranges of the Andes, in Peru and Colombia.
  • coronal mass ejection — a cloud of particles ejected from the sun's surface during a solar flare
  • 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.
  • correctional facility — A correctional facility is a prison or similar institution.
  • corrupt practices act — any of several U.S. statutes for ensuring the purity of elections by forbidding the purchase of votes, restricting the amount and source of political contributions, limiting campaign expenditures, and requiring the submission of an itemized statement of such expenditures.
  • cosmological argument — one of the arguments that purport to prove the existence of God from empirical facts about the universe, esp the argument to the existence of a first cause
  • cosmological redshift — the part of the redshift of celestial objects resulting from the expansion of the universe.
  • cost driver attribute — (programming)   Factors affecting the productivity of software development. These include attributes of the software, computers, personnel, and project.
  • cost-benefit analysis — an analysis that takes into account the costs of a project and its benefits to society, as well as the revenue it generates
  • 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
  • counter-revolutionary — Counter-revolutionary activities are activities intended to reverse the effects of a previous revolution.
  • counterdemonstrations — Plural form of counterdemonstration.
  • counterinterpretation — An interpretation that goes against another interpretation.
  • crankcase compression — Crankcase compression is the method of starting some smaller two-stroke engines, where the mixture charge is compressed in a sealed crankcase by the descending piston before passing to the combustion chamber.
  • credit card guarantee — If you pay for a booking at a hotel by credit card, a credit card guarantee allows the hotel to charge a cost to your credit card if you do not arrive on the day you arranged or if you damage something in the hotel.
  • credit card insurance — Credit card insurance is coverage for situations in which someone fraudulently uses your credit card.
  • credit life insurance — insurance guaranteeing payment of the unpaid portion of a loan if the debtor should die.
  • criminal conversation — (formerly) a common law action brought by a husband by which he claimed damages against an adulterer
  • croscarmellose sodium — Croscarmellose sodium is a substance used in tablets and capsules as a disintegrant.
  • cross-cousin marriage — marriage between the children of a brother and sister.
  • 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.
  • customer satisfaction — When customers are pleased with the goods or services they have bought, you can refer to customer satisfaction.
  • cyclical unemployment — unemployment caused by fluctuations in the level of economic activity inherent in trade cycles
  • cyclomatic complexity — (programming, testing)   A measure of the number of linearly independent paths through a program module. Cyclomatic complexity is a measure for the complexity of code related to the number of ways there are to traverse a piece of code. This determines the minimum number of inputs you need to test all ways to execute the program.
  • dark-field microscope — ultramicroscope
  • 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.
  • decompression chamber — a chamber in which the pressure of air can be varied slowly for returning people from abnormal pressures to atmospheric pressure without inducing decompression sickness
  • deep scattering layer — any of the stratified zones in the ocean which reflect sound during echo sounding, usually composed of marine organisms which migrate vertically from c. 250 to 800 m (c. 820 to 2,625 ft)
  • democratic centralism — the Leninist principle that policy should be decided centrally by officials, who are nominally democratically elected
  • dendrochronologically — By the use of, or with reference to dendrochronology.
  • denominational school — a school associated with a particular religious denomination
  • deoxyribonucleic acid — DNA
  • department of justice — the department of the U.S. federal government charged with the responsibility for the enforcement of federal laws. Abbreviation: DOJ.
  • deprovincialization's — to make provincial in character.
  • detoxification centre — a place that specializes in the treatment of alcoholism or drug addiction
  • development education — an area of study that aims to give pupils an understanding of their involvement in world affairs
  • devil's walking-stick — Hercules'-club (sense 1)
  • devil's-walking-stick — Hercules-club (def 2).
  • dictionary definition — the meaning of a word as given in a dictionary or dictionaries
  • differential calculus — the branch of mathematics that deals with differentials and derivatives.
  • digital videocassette — a videocassette containing magnetic tape used for high-fidelity digital recording or playback of video. Abbreviation: DVC.
  • direct inward dialing — (communications)   (DID) A service offered by telephone companies which allows the last 3 or 4 digits of a phone number to be transmitted to the destination exchange. For example, a company could have 10 incoming lines, all with the number 234 000. If a caller dials 234 697, the call is sent to 234 000 (the company's exchange), and the digits 697 are transmitted. The company's exchange then routes the call to extension 697. This gives the impression of 1000 direct dial lines, whereas in fact there are only 10. Obviously, only 10 at a time can be used. This system is also used by fax servers. Instead of an exchange at the end of the 234 000 line, a computer running fax server software and fax modem cards uses the last three digits to identify the recipient of the fax. This allows 1000 people to have their own individual fax numbers, even though there is only one 'fax machine'.
  • discretionary account — an account in which the stockbroker is allowed complete control over the purchase and sale of securities on the customer's behalf.
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