20-letter words containing a, l, n
- colorpoint shorthair — any of a breed of domestic cat, bred by crossing a Siamese and an American shorthair, with blue, almond-shaped eyes and a short, glossy, white coat shading to a darker color at the face, ears, feet, and tail
- common yellow throat — a widely distributed wood warbler, Geothlypis trichas, of North America and Mexico, in the male having a black facial mask and yellow underparts.
- common-sense realism — naive realism.
- commonwealth hackish — (jargon) Hacker jargon as spoken outside the US, especially in the British Commonwealth. It is reported that Commonwealth speakers are more likely to pronounce truncations like "char" and "soc", etc., as spelled (/char/, /sok/), as opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in newsgroup names (especially two-component names) tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot wib'l/ rather than /sohsh wib'l/). The prefix meta may be pronounced /mee't*/; similarly, Greek letter beta is usually /bee't*/, zeta is usually /zee't*/, and so forth. Preferred metasyntactic variables include blurgle, "eek", "ook", "frodo", and "bilbo"; "wibble", "wobble", and in emergencies "wubble"; "banana", "tom", "dick", "harry", "wombat", "frog", fish, and so on and on (see foo). Alternatives to verb doubling include suffixes "-o-rama", "frenzy" (as in feeding frenzy), and "city" (examples: "barf city!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump frenzy!"). Finally, note that the American terms "parens", "brackets", and "braces" for (), [], and {} are uncommon; Commonwealth hackish prefers "brackets", "square brackets", and "curly brackets". Also, the use of "pling" for bang is common outside the United States. See also attoparsec, calculator, chemist, console jockey, fish, go-faster stripes, grunge, hakspek, heavy metal, leaky heap, lord high fixer, loose bytes, muddie, nadger, noddy, psychedelicware, plingnet, raster blaster, RTBM, seggie, spod, sun lounge, terminal junkie, tick-list features, weeble, weasel, YABA, and notes or definitions under Bad Thing, barf, bum, chase pointers, cosmic rays, crippleware, crunch, dodgy, gonk, hamster, hardwarily, mess-dos, nibble, proglet, root, SEX, tweak and xyzzy.
- communication skills — the ability to convey information and ideas effectively
- comparative religion — a field of study seeking to derive general principles from a comparison and classification of the growth and influence of various religions.
- compartmentalisation — Alternative form of compartmentalization.
- compartmentalization — to divide into categories or compartments.
- compensating balance — Also, compensated balance, compensation balance. a balance wheel in a timepiece, designed to compensate for variations in tension in the hair spring caused by changes in temperature.
- 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 colour — one of any pair of colours, such as yellow and blue, that give white or grey when mixed in the correct proportions
- 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.
- complete unification — (programming) W.P. Weijland's name for unification without occur check.
- condensation nucleus — nucleus (def 5).
- conformal projection — a map projection in which angles formed by lines are preserved: a map made using this projection preserves the shape of any small area.
- 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.
- consultant physician — a physician who has attained the rank of consultant in a particular speciality
- 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)
- contingency planning — planning for future events that seem less likely than others
- contingent liability — a possible liability that is dependent on the outcome of a future event
- controlled substance — a drug regulated by the Federal Controlled Substances Acts, including opiates, depressants, stimulants, and hallucinogens
- conventional weapons — weapons which are not nuclear
- coordination complex — one of a number of complex compounds in which an atom or group of atoms is bound to the central atom by a shared pair of electrons supplied by the coordinated group and not by the central atom
- copulative asyndeton — a staccato effect produced by omitting copulative connectives between two or more items in a group, as in “Friends, Romans, countrymen.”.
- correctional officer — a prison guard
- 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
- council-manager plan — (in the US) a system of local government with an elected legislative council and an appointed administrative manager
- counter-inflationary — designed to reduce inflation
- counterproliferation — Action intended to prevent an increase or spread in the possession of nuclear weapons.
- counterrevolutionary — Counterrevolutionary activities are activities intended to reverse the effects of a previous revolution.
- craniosacral therapy — a form of therapy for various disorders in which the therapist manipulates the bones of the skull
- credit card terminal — A credit card terminal is a piece of equipment that you use to read the information on a credit card and charge a cost to it.
- criminal proceedings — action taken in a court to bring a criminal prosecution against someone
- criminal syndicalism — the doctrine of recourse to acts of violence or terrorism, or the advocacy of such acts, as a means of effecting economic or political change: proscribed by statute in many U.S. states.
- cross someone's palm — to give someone money
- crude oil evaluation — Crude oil evaluation is the process of assessing the chemical and physical properties of crude oil, against particular standards.
- cycloidal propulsion — propulsion of a vessel by propellers of controllable pitch that steer as well as propel.
- cylinder head gasket — (in an automobile engine) a gasket placed between the cylinder and the cylinder heads to avoid leaks of coolant and compression
- data dictionary file — (database) (DDF) A set of files describing the structure of a database file. DDFs define database tables and include information about file locations, field layouts and indexes. DDFs are the standard method for defining field and index characteristics for Btrieve files.
- 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.
- death of ivan ilyich — a short novel (1884) by Leo Tolstoy.
- decahydronaphthalene — a colorless, aromatic liquid, C 10 H 18 , insoluble in water and soluble in alcohol and ether: used as a solvent for oils, fats, etc., in cleaning fluids, lubricants, etc.
- declarative language — (language) Any relational language or functional language. These kinds of programming language describe relationships between variables in terms of functions or inference rules, and the language executor (interpreter or compiler) applies some fixed algorithm to these relations to produce a result. Declarative languages contrast with imperative languages which specify explicit manipulation of the computer's internal state; or procedural languages which specify an explicit sequence of steps to follow. The most common examples of declarative languages are logic programming languages such as Prolog and functional languages like Haskell. See also production system.
- declaratory judgment — a judgment that merely decides the rights of parties in a given transaction, situation, or dispute but does not order any action or award damages.