15-letter words containing a, i, c
- crawling horror — (jargon) Ancient crufty hardware or software that is kept obstinately alive by forces beyond the control of the hackers at a site. Like dusty deck or gonkulator, but connotes that the thing described is not just an irritation but an active menace to health and sanity. "Mostly we code new stuff in C, but they pay us to maintain one big Fortran II application from nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling horror." Compare WOMBAT.
- creatine kinase — an enzyme that, during muscular activity, catalyzes the transfer of a phosphoryl group from phosphocreatine in muscle to produce ATP.
- credibility gap — A credibility gap is the difference between what a person says or promises and what they actually think or do.
- credit standing — reputation for discharging financial obligations
- credit transfer — A credit transfer is a direct payment of money from one bank account into another.
- creditor nation — a nation that owes less to foreign and international bodies than they owe to it
- creme de cassis — a sweet, purplish-red liqueur flavored with black currants
- creme de fraise — a liqueur flavored principally with strawberries.
- cricopharyngeal — of, relating to, or involving the cricoid cartilage and the pharynx.
- cricopharyngeus — (anatomy) Part of the inferior pharyngeal constrictor, arising from the cricoid cartilage.
- criminal damage — intentionally damaging property that belongs to someone else, including public property
- criminal lawyer — a lawyer who deals with criminal rather than civil cases
- criminal record — a list of a person's criminal convictions
- criminalisation — (chiefly, British) Alternative form of criminalization.
- criminalization — to make punishable as a crime: To reduce the graffiti on subway cars, he wants to criminalize the selling of spray paint to minors.
- crimson rosella — an Australian parrot, Platycercus elegans, often kept as a cage bird
- crinkum-crankum — a fanciful name for any object that is full of twists and turns
- crisis software — A small UK company producing software for the Acorn Archimedes range of computers.
- crispus attucks — Crispus [kris-puh s] /ˈkrɪs pəs/ (Show IPA), 1723?–70, American patriot, probably a fugitive slave, killed in the Boston Massacre.
- critical period — a period in a lifetime during which a specific stage of development usually occurs. If it fails to do so, it cannot readily occur afterwards
- critical region — that part of a statistical distribution in which the probability of a given hypothesis is less than the chosen significance level, so that the hypothesis would be rejected
- critical volume — the volume occupied by one mole or unit mass of a substance in its critical state
- crocodile tears — If someone is crying crocodile tears, their tears and sadness are not genuine or sincere.
- crohn's disease — inflammation, thickening, and ulceration of any of various parts of the intestine, esp the ileum
- cross-pollinate — to subject or be subjected to cross-pollination
- crossfunctional — Spanning several functions.
- crossing patrol — a person who holds up the traffic so that school children can cross the road safely
- crossopterygian — any bony fish of the subclass Crossopterygii, having fleshy limblike pectoral fins. The group, now mostly extinct, contains the ancestors of the amphibians
- crossreactivity — Alternative spelling of cross-reactivity.
- cruising radius — the greatest distance that an aircraft or ship can cruise, away from and back to a certain point without refueling
- crush-resistant — not being easily creased
- crustaceologist — One who studies crustaceology.
- cryoanaesthesia — Alternative spelling of cryoanesthesia.
- cryoprecipitate — a precipitate obtained by controlled thawing of a previously frozen substance. Factor VIII, for treating haemophilia, is often obtained as a cryoprecipitate from frozen blood
- cryptographical — the science or study of the techniques of secret writing, especially code and cipher systems, methods, and the like. Compare cryptanalysis (def 2).
- crystal healing — (in alternative therapy) the use of the supposed power of crystals to affect the human energy field
- crystal lattice — the regular array of points about which the atoms, ions, or molecules composing a crystal are centred
- crystal pick-up — a record-player pick-up in which the current is generated by the deformation of a piezoelectric crystal caused by the movements of the stylus
- crystalliferous — producing or containing crystals
- crystallisation — (British) alternative spelling of crystallization.
- crystallization — Crystallization is the process in which crystals are formed either from something that has been melted or from a solution.
- csk corporation — (company) The japanese company that owns CSK Software and Sega. CSK Corp. is the largest independent japanese software company.
- cucumber mosaic — a viral disease of cucumbers and many other plants, characterized by a mosaic pattern and distortion of leaves and fruits.
- cultural cringe — the perception that one's own culture is inferior to that of another group or country
- culturalization — to expose or subject to the influence of culture.
- culture jamming — a form of political and social activism which, by means of fake adverts, hoax news stories, pastiches of company logos and product labels, computer hacking, etc, draws attention to and at the same time subverts the power of the media, governments, and large corporations to control and distort the information that they give to the public in order to promote consumerism, militarism, etc
- cum grano salis — with a grain of salt; not too literally
- curate's-eggish — good in parts
- curia rhaetorum — a city in E Switzerland, capital of Graubünden canton. Pop: 32 989 (2000)
- curie-weiss law — the principle that the magnetic susceptibility of a paramagnetic substance is inversely proportional to the difference between its temperature and its Curie point