27-letter words containing a, c, n, t, h, o
- old chestnut/hoary chestnut — If you refer to a statement, a story, or a joke as an old chestnut or a hoary chestnut, you mean that it has been repeated so often that it is no longer interesting.
- on the coat-tails of sb/sth — If you do something on the coat-tails of someone else, you are able to do it because of the other person's success, and not because of your own efforts.
- open scripting architecture — (OSA) A CIL approach to the coexistence of multiple scripting systems.
- oscillating universe theory — the theory that the universe is oscillating between periods of expansion and collapse
- peripheral technology group — (company) A national and international distributor of IBM PC-to-Unix and Internet connectivity products. They cater for resellers, dealers and VARs and are one of the top Seagate and Micropolis distributors in the US. Address: Eden Prairie, MN, USA (a suburb of Minneapolis). Eden Prairie ("Silicon Prairie") is the home of Digi International, Ontrack, Open Systems, LaserMaster, Best Buy, and others.
- physiological salt solution — isotonic sodium chloride solution.
- plain old telephone service — (communications) (POTS) The traditional voice service provided by phone companies, especially when opposed to data services. Note that the acronym POTS is sometimes expanded as "Plain Old Telephone System" in which sense it is synonymous to Public Switched Telephone Network but used somewhat derogatively.
- polyalphabetic substitution — a system of substitution that mixes together a number of cipher alphabets in a cryptogram so that each plaintext letter is represented by a cipher that repeatedly changes.
- portable scheme interpreter — (PSI) A portable scheme interpreter by Ozan Yigit <[email protected]>, David Keldsen and Pontus Hedman that includes a simple DAG compiler and a virtual machine. It can be used as an integrated extension interpreter in other systems and allows easy addition of new primitives. There are some unique debugging and tracing facilities. Acceptable performance results from a fairly straight-forward implementation. Continuations are fully and portably supported and perform well. PSI is based on the simple compilers and virtual machine in Kent Dbyvig's thesis. The pre-release version conforms to R4RS with a number of useful extensions.
- protestant episcopal church — Episcopal Church in America.
- rough endoplasmic reticulum — a network of tubular membranes within the cytoplasm of the cell, occurring either with a smooth surface (smooth endoplasmic reticulum) or studded with ribosomes (rough endoplasmic reticulum) involved in the transport of materials.
- scalable coherent interface — (hardware, protocol) (SCI) The ANSI/IEEE 1596-1992 standard that defines a point-to-point interface and a set of packet protocols. The SCI protocols use packets with a 16-byte header and 16, 64, or 256 data bytes. Each packet is protected by a 16-bit CRC code. The standard defines 1 Gbit/second serial fiber-optic links and 1 Gbyte/second parallel copper links. SCI has two unidirectional links that operate concurrently. The SCI protocols support shared memory by encapsulating bus requests and responses into SCI request and response packets. Packet-based handshake protocols guarantee reliable data delivery. A set of cache coherence protocols are defined to maintain cache coherence in a shared memory system. SCI uses 64-bit addressing and the most significant 16 bits are used for addressing up to 64K nodes.
- single connector attachment — Single Connection Attach
- soft-coated wheaten terrier — one of an Irish breed of medium-sized sporting terriers having an abundant, soft, medium-length coat, any shade of wheat in color, with its head and face profusely covered with coat.
- stanford research institute — Former name of SRI International.
- sth is not an exact science — there are no set rules to follow, or something may produce results that are not wholly accurate
- synchronous optical network — (networking) (SONET) A broadband networking standard based on point-to-point optical fibre networks. SONET will provide a high-bandwidth "pipe" to support ATM-based services. The SONET standard will establish a digital hierarchical network with a consistent worldwide transport scheme. SONET has been designed to take advantage of fibre, in contrast to the plain old telephone system which was designed for copper wires. SONET carries circuit-switched data in frames at speeds in multiples of 51.84 megabits per second (Mbps) up to 48 * 51.84 Mbps = 2.488 gigabits per second. Since SONET uses multiple channels to transmit data, each SONET frame can be considered to be a two-dimensional table of bytes that is 9 rows high and 90 columns deep. For every OC-n level, SONET can transmit n number of frames at a given time. Groups of frames are called superframes. SONET is the American version of SDH.
- take exception to something — If you take exception to something, you feel offended or annoyed by it, usually with the result that you complain about it.
- take sth into consideration — If you take something into consideration, you think about it because it is relevant to what you are doing.
- teach an old dog new tricks — to induce a person of settled habits to adopt new methods or ideas
- telephone answering machine — answering machine.
- the hunchback of notre dame — French Notre Dame de Paris. a novel (1831) by Victor Hugo.
- the shape of things to come — If you say that something is the shape of things to come, you mean that it is the start of a new trend or development, and in future things will be like this.
- third law of thermodynamics — any of three principles variously stated in equivalent forms, being the principle that the change of energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the heat transferred minus the work done (first law of thermodynamics) the principle that no cyclic process is possible in which heat is absorbed from a reservoir at a single temperature and converted completely into mechanical work (second law of thermodynamics) and the principle that it is impossible to reduce the temperature of a system to absolute zero in a finite number of operations (third law of thermodynamics)
- to fight a rearguard action — if someone is fighting a rearguard action or mounting a rearguard action, they are trying very hard to prevent something from happening, even though it is probably too late for them to succeed
- to know something backwards — In British English, if you say that someone knows something backwards, you are emphasizing that they know it very well. In American English, you say that someone knows something backward and forward.
- to put your thinking cap on — to ponder a matter or problem
- to steal a march on someone — If you steal a march on someone, you start doing something before they do it in order to gain an advantage over them.
- to the accompaniment of sth — If one thing happens to the accompaniment of another, they happen at the same time.
- to turn your back on sb/sth — If you turn your back on someone or something, you ignore them, leave them, or reject them.
- trichlorophenoxyacetic acid — an insoluble crystalline solid; 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid. It is a plant hormone and is used as a weedkiller. Formula: C8H5Cl3O3
- virtual machine environment — (operating system) (VME) ICL's mainframe operating system.
- with one's back to the wall — in a difficult or desperate situation
- you can't have it both ways — If someone says that you can't have it both ways, they are telling you that you have to choose between two things and cannot do or have them both.
- you wouldn't/won't catch me — You can say things such as 'You wouldn't catch me doing that' to emphasize that you would never do a particular thing.