20-letter words containing a, l, e, s, n
- compensation culture — a culture in which people are very ready to go to law over even relatively minor incidents in the hope of gaining compensation
- complaints procedure — a prescribed method of lodging a complaint to an institution
- complementary angles — either of two angles that added together produce an angle of 90°.
- complementary colors — any of two colors of the spectrum that, combined in the right intensities, produce white or nearly white light
- complementary strand — either of the two chains that make up a double helix of DNA, with corresponding positions on the two chains being composed of a pair of complementary bases.
- condensation nucleus — nucleus (def 5).
- congressional record — (in the US) the government journal that publishes all proceedings of Congress
- congressman-at-large — (in the US) a member of the House of Representatives who was elected by the voters of an entire state as opposed to the voters of a single Congressional district
- constituent assembly — A constituent assembly is a body of representatives that is elected to create or change their country's constitution.
- continental congress — the assembly of delegates from the North American rebel colonies held during and after the War of American Independence. It issued the Declaration of Independence (1776) and framed the Articles of Confederation (1777)
- controlled substance — a drug regulated by the Federal Controlled Substances Acts, including opiates, depressants, stimulants, and hallucinogens
- conventional weapons — weapons which are not nuclear
- copulative asyndeton — a staccato effect produced by omitting copulative connectives between two or more items in a group, as in “Friends, Romans, countrymen.”.
- corresponding angles — a pair of nonadjacent angles, one interior and one exterior, on the same side of a transversal: these paired angles are equal if the lines cut by the transversal are parallel
- craniosacral therapy — a form of therapy for various disorders in which the therapist manipulates the bones of the skull
- criminal proceedings — action taken in a court to bring a criminal prosecution against someone
- cross someone's palm — to give someone money
- cylinder head gasket — (in an automobile engine) a gasket placed between the cylinder and the cylinder heads to avoid leaks of coolant and compression
- daylight saving time — Daylight Saving Time is a period of time in the summer when the clocks are set one hour forward, so that people can have extra light in the evening.
- daylight-saving time — the civil time observed when daylight saving is adopted in a country or community.
- deinstitutionalizing — Present participle of deinstitutionalize.
- dementia pugilistica — chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
- deontological 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.
- dickless workstation — (abuse) Extremely pejorative hackerism for "diskless workstation".
- diels-alder reaction — the reaction in which a conjugated diene combines with a double or triple bond of a given compound to form a ring of six carbon atoms.
- differential housing — the casing that houses the differential of a motor vehicle
- digital service unit — data service unit
- dimensional analysis — a method for comparing the dimensions of the physical quantities occurring in a problem to find relationships between the quantities without having to solve the problem completely. Compare dimension (def 6).
- diophantine analysis — any of several methods for finding integral solutions for equations with more than one variable whose coefficients are integers.
- disability allowance — an amount of money paid by the government to people who are unable to work because of a disability. This is a general term or, in the UK, a shorter way of referring to what is officially called the Disability Living Allowance
- disability insurance — insurance providing income to a policyholder who is disabled and cannot work.
- disciplinary hearing — a hearing at which the conduct of a member of an organization, profession etc is examined and a punishment may be handed down
- discounted cash flow — a technique for appraising an investment that takes into account the different values of future returns according to when they will be received
- diskless workstation — (computer, networking) A personal computer or workstation which has neither a hard disk nor floppy disk drive and which performs all file access via a local area network connection to a file server. The lowest level bootstrap code is stored in non-volatile storage. This uses a simple protocol such as BOOTP to request and download more sophisticated boot code and eventually, the operating system. The archtypal product was the 3Station developed by Bob Metcalfe at 3Com. Another example was the Sun 3/50. Diskless workstations are ideal when many users are running the same application. They are small, quiet, more reliable than products with disks, and help prevent both the theft of data and the introduction of viruses since the software and data available on them is controlled by the network administrator or system administrator. They do however rely on a server which becomes a disadvantage if it is heavily loaded or down. See also breath-of-life packet.
- displacement current — the rate of change, at any point in space, of electric displacement with time.
- displacement tonnage — the number of long tons of water displaced by a vessel, light or load displacement being specified.
- distribution channel — trade: retailer
- domestic heating oil — a liquid petroleum product used to fuel residential building furnaces or boilers
- draw close/draw near — If an event or period of time is drawing closer or is drawing nearer, it is approaching.
- drum and bugle corps — a marching band of drum players and buglers.
- drunk and disorderly — If someone is charged with being drunk and disorderly, they are charged with being drunk and behaving in a noisy, offensive, or violent way in public.
- duck-billed dinosaur — hadrosaur.
- early modern english — the English language represented in printed documents of the period starting with Caxton (1476) and ending with Dryden (1700).
- early sunday morning — a painting (1930) by Edward Hopper.
- early warning system — Military. a network of radar installations designed to detect enemy aircraft or missiles in time for the effective deployment of defense systems.
- early-warning system — Military. a network of radar installations designed to detect enemy aircraft or missiles in time for the effective deployment of defense systems.
- economic rationalism — an economic policy based on the efficiency of market forces, characterized by minimal government intervention, tax cuts, privatization, and deregulation of labour markets
- electoral boundaries — the way that a country or area is divided for the purposes of voting in an election
- electrohydrodynamics — (physics) the study of the dynamics of electrically conducting fluid.
- electronic signature — electronic proof of a person's identity