14-letter words containing a, c, n, e, d
- nondiffractive — Not diffractive.
- nondirectional — functioning equally well in all directions; omnidirectional.
- nondoctrinaire — not concerned with or related to doctrine
- nondocumentary — a film or television programme not reflecting real life
- noneducational — not educational or related to education
- nonideological — Unaffiliated with or unrelated to ideology.
- nonpredictable — Not predictable.
- nonprejudicial — causing prejudice or disadvantage; detrimental.
- nonradioactive — not radioactive
- north cascades — a national park in NW Washington: site of glaciers and mountain lakes. 789 sq. mi. (2043 sq. km).
- notched collar — a collar forming a notch with the lapels of a garment at the seam where collar and lapels join.
- nudibranchiate — nudibranch.
- numeric keypad — a separate section on some computer keyboards, grouping together numeric keys and those for mathematical or other special functions in an arrangement like that of a calculator.
- numidian crane — the demoiselle crane
- old-time dance — a formal or formation dance, such as the lancers
- once and again — occasionally
- operation code — (programming) (Always "op code" when spoken) The part or parts of a machine language instruction which determines what kind of action the computer should take, e.g. add, jump, load, store. In any particular instruction set certain fixed bit positions within the instruction word contain the op code, others give parameters such as the addresses or registers involved. For example, in a 32-bit instruction the most significant eight bits might be the op code giving 256 possible operations. For some instruction sets, certain values in the fixed bit positions may select a group of operations and the exact operation may depend on other bits within instruction word or subsequent words. When programming in assembly language, the op code is represented by a readable name called an instruction mnemonic.
- ordnance corps — a combat support military unit responsible for developing and maintaining weapons and weapon systems
- ordnance datum — mean sea level calculated from observation taken at Newlyn, Cornwall, and used as the official basis for height calculation on British maps
- osteochondroma — (medicine) A benign tumor consisting of bone or cartilage.
- outside chance — a slight chance or likelihood
- over-abundance — an excessive amount or abundance; surfeit: an overabundance of sugar in the diet.
- overdecoration — excessive decoration
- overmedication — the act or instance of medicating unnecessarily or excessively
- panic disorder — a disorder in which inappropriate, intense apprehension and physical symptoms of fear occur so frequently as to produce significant impairment.
- parcel gilding — the gilding of only some areas or ornaments of a piece of furniture.
- peace dividend — money cut by a government from its defense budget as a result of the cessation of hostilities with other countries.
- pedanticalness — ostentatious in one's learning.
- peel-and-stick — ready to be applied after peeling off the backing to expose an adhesive surface: peel-and-stick labels.
- pendulum watch — (formerly) a watch having a balance wheel, especially a balance wheel bearing a fake pendulum bob oscillating behind a window in the dial.
- pentadactylism — the state of having five digits on each limb
- pentanoic acid — colourless liquid carboxylic acid
- plagal cadence — a cadence in which the chord of the tonic is preceded by that of the subdominant.
- platinocyanide — a salt of platinocyanic acid.
- pneumatic duct — the duct joining the air bladder and alimentary canal of a physostomous fish.
- pneumodynamics — Physics. pneumatics.
- polar distance — codeclination.
- postadolescent — growing to manhood or womanhood; youthful.
- preadolescence — the period preceding adolescence, usually designated as the years from 10 to 13.
- precision-made — made to precise specifications
- predicate noun — a noun used in the predicate with a copulative verb or a factitive verb and having the same referent as the subject of the copulative verb or the direct object of the factitive verb, as in She is the mayor or They elected her mayor.
- pride of china — the chinaberry, Melia azedarach.
- procaine amide — a white, crystalline compound, C 1 3 H 2 1 ON 3 , used in the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias.
- procrastinated — to defer action; delay: to procrastinate until an opportunity is lost.
- promenade deck — an upper deck or part of a deck on a passenger ship where passengers can stroll, often covered with a light shade deck.
- propenoic acid — systematic name of acrylic acid
- provincialised — to make provincial in character.
- quintuplicated — Simple past tense and past participle of quintuplicate.
- quoted company — a company whose shares are quoted on a stock exchange
- race condition — Anomalous behavior due to unexpected critical dependence on the relative timing of events. For example, if one process writes to a file while another is reading from the same location then the data read may be the old contents, the new contents or some mixture of the two depending on the relative timing of the read and write operations. A common remedy in this kind of race condition is file locking; a more cumbersome remedy is to reorganize the system such that a certain processes (running a daemon or the like) is the only process that has access to the file, and all other processes that need to access the data in that file do so only via interprocess communication with that one process. As an example of a more subtle kind of race condition, consider a distributed chat network like IRC, where a user is granted channel-operator privileges in any channel he starts. If two users on different servers, on different ends of the same network, try to start the same-named channel at the same time, each user's respective server will grant channel-operator privileges to each user, since neither will yet have received the other's signal that that channel has been started. In this case of a race condition, the "shared resource" is the conception of the state of the network (what channels exist, as well as what users started them and therefore have what privileges), which each server is free to change as long as it signals the other servers on the network about the changes so that they can update their conception of the state of the network. However, the latency across the network makes possible the kind of race condition described. In this case, heading off race conditions by imposing a form of control over access to the shared resource -- say, appointing one server to be in charge of who holds what privileges -- would mean turning the distributed network into a centralized one (at least for that one part of the network operation). Where this is not acceptable, the more pragmatic solution is to have the system recognize when a race condition has occurred and to repair the ill effects. Race conditions also affect electronic circuits where the value output by a logic gate depends on the exact timing of two or more input signals. For example, consider a two input AND gate fed with a logic signal X on input A and its negation, NOT X, on input B. In theory, the output (X AND NOT X) should never be high. However, if changes in the value of X take longer to propagate to input B than to input A then when X changes from false to true, there will be a brief period during which both inputs are true, and so the gate's output will also be true. If this output is fed to an edge-sensitive component such as a counter or flip-flop then the temporary effect ("glitch") will become permanent.