23-letter words containing a, c, n, e, v
- marriage of convenience — marriage entered into for a personal or family advantage, as for social, political, or economic reasons, usually without love and sometimes without the expectation of sexual relations.
- moving target indicator — a Doppler-radar presentation that indicates moving targets only, stationary objects reflecting signals that the system rejects. Abbreviation: MTI.
- multiplicative identity — an identity that when used to multiply a given element in a specified set leaves that element unchanged, as the number 1 for the real-number system.
- national health service — In Britain, the National Health Service is the state system for providing medical care. It is paid for by taxes.
- nonverbal communication — gesture and facial expression
- over-the-counter market — a security market that deals in securities that are not listed or quoted on a stock exchange
- overnight accommodation — accommodation provided by an establishment (such as a hotel) where guests can sleep or spend the night
- own occupation coverage — Own occupation coverage is insurance that covers a person if they cannot work in their own occupation, following an accident, injury, or disability.
- participant observation — a technique of field research, used in anthropology and sociology, by which an investigator (participant observer) studies the life of a group by sharing in its activities.
- positive discrimination — special opportunities
- print services facility — (printer) (PSF) IBM's system software which generates native IBM printer language, IPDS and, depending on the version, PostScript and LaserJet PCL. See also: Advanced Function Presentation.
- private branch exchange — (communications) (PBX) A telephone exchange local to a particular organisation who use, rather than provide, telephone services. The earliest PBXs were manual (Private Manual Branch EXchange, PMBX) but are now more likely to be automatic (Private Automatic Branch eXchange).
- private limited company — a company whose shares can be bought by the public
- provocative maintenance — [Common ironic mutation of "preventive maintenance"] Actions performed upon a machine at regularly scheduled intervals to ensure that the system remains in a usable state. So called because it is all too often performed by a field servoid who doesn't know what he is doing; such "maintenance" often *induces* problems, or otherwise results in the machine's remaining in an *un*usable state for an indeterminate amount of time. See also scratch monkey.
- quote chapter and verse — [by analogy with the mainstream phrase] To cite a relevant excerpt from an appropriate bible. "I don't care if "rn" gets it wrong; "Followup-To: poster" is explicitly permitted by RFC 1036. I'll quote chapter and verse if you don't believe me." See also legalese, language lawyer, RTFS (sense 2).
- residual current device — a circuit-breaking device installed in electrical equipment to protect the operator from electrocution
- saint christopher-nevis — St. Kitts-Nevis.
- secondary seventh chord — a chord formed by superposition of three thirds upon any degree of the scale except the dominant.
- self extracting archive — (file format) (SEA) An archive format used on the Apple Macintosh. Double-clicking a file of this type should extract its contents.
- seneca falls convention — a women's rights convention held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.
- sovereignty association — (in Canada) a proposed arrangement by which Quebec would become independent but would maintain a formal association with Canada
- swine vesicular disease — a viral disease of swine characterized by vesicular lesions on the feet, legs, snout, and tongue
- to save someone's bacon — If someone or something saves your bacon, they get you out of a dangerous or difficult situation.
- topological equivalence — the property of two topological spaces such that there is a homeomorphism from one to the other.
- universal character set — (character, standard) (UCS, ISO/IEC 10646) A 1993 ISO and IEC standard character set, also known as "Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set". UCS comes in a 16-bit variant called UCS-2 and a 32-bit variant called UCS-4, which is composed of 16-bit UCS-2 "planes". So far only one 16-bit plane has been defined, which is known as the Basic Multilingual Plane. The implementation of UCS is still in its infancy, though some moves, such as the Java language defining a character to be 16 bits, are suggestive.
- urban conservation area — an urban area that is protected, preserved and carefully managed
- valera y alcala galiano — Juan [hwahn] /ʰwɑn/ (Show IPA), 1824–1905, Spanish novelist, critic, diplomat, and statesman.
- variable contrast paper — printing paper in which the contrast of the image is controlled by the color of the printing light.
- variable life insurance — an insurance policy whose annuity payments or payment to the beneficiary are not fixed but depend on the income earned by the investment of the premiums.
- velocity of circulation — the frequency with which a single unit of currency or the total money supply turns over within the economy in a given year.
- ventricular tachycardia — a cardiac arrhythmia in which the muscles of the ventricles contract irregularly in a rapid, uncoordinated manner, impairing the normal pumping of blood.
- verifiability principle — the doctrine that if a nonanalytic statement is to be cognitively meaningful it must be empirically verifiable.
- vestibulocochlear nerve — either one of the eight pairs of cranial nerves that supply the cochlea and semicircular canals of the internal ear and contribute to the sense of hearing
- virtual device location — (Or "Virtual Address") The address of a device (e.g. disk, printer, terminal) belonging to a "guest" operating system. Such an address is mapped to a physical device. VM may remap several virtual disks to different parts of a single physical disk.
- viscount horatio nelson — Viscount Horatio, 1758–1805, British admiral.
- volumetric displacement — the volume of air per revolution that passes through a mechanical pump when the pressure at the intake and the exhaust is the same as that of the atmosphere
- voter registration card — a card that enables a person to register in order to vote
- wind cave national park — a national park in SW South Dakota. 41½ sq. mi. (107 sq. km).