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21-letter words containing a, l, n

  • blow one's brains out — to kill oneself by shooting oneself in the head
  • bluethroat pikeblenny — See under pikeblenny.
  • boiling-water reactor — a nuclear reactor using water as coolant and moderator, steam being produced in the reactor itself: enriched uranium oxide cased in zirconium is the fuel
  • bonnie prince charlie — a member of the royal family that ruled in Scotland from 1371 to 1714 and in England from 1603 to 1714.
  • bow to the inevitable — If someone bows to the inevitable and does something that they do not want to do, they do it, because circumstances force them to do it.
  • brazilian firecracker — a tropical American twining plant, Manettia inflata, of the madder family, having opposite, lance-shaped leaves and a red, tubular flower with yellow tips, grown in the southern U.S. as a trellis plant.
  • brazilian pepper tree — a small Brazilian evergreen tree or shrub, Schinus terebinthifolius, of the cashew family, having inconspicuous white flowers and bright red fruit: the berries are used for Christmas decorations.
  • breakthrough bleeding — bleeding from the uterus that occurs between menstrual periods
  • british anti-lewisite — a colorless, oily, viscous liquid, C 3 H 8 OS 2 , originally developed as an antidote to lewisite and now used in treating bismuth, gold, mercury, and arsenic poisoning.
  • british sign language — the main sign language used by deaf people in the United Kingdom
  • bromine pentafluoride — a colorless, corrosive liquid, BrF 5 , used as an oxidizer in liquid rocket propellants.
  • bulletin board system — (communications, application)   (BBS, bboard /bee'bord/, message board, forum; plural: BBSes) A computer and associated software which typically provides an electronic message database where people can log in and leave messages. Messages are typically split into topic groups similar to the newsgroups on Usenet (which is like a distributed BBS). Any user may submit or read any message in these public areas. The term comes from physical pieces of board on which people can pin messages written on paper for general consumption - a "physical bulletin board". Ward Christensen, the programmer and operator of the first BBS (on-line 1978-02-16) called it a CBBS for "computer bulletin board system". Since the rise of the World-Wide Web, the term has become antiquated, though the concept is more popular than ever, with many websites featuring discussion areas where users can post messages for public consumption. Apart from public message areas, some BBSes provided archives of files, personal electronic mail and other services of interest to the system operator (sysop). Thousands of BBSes around the world were run from amateurs' homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Although BBSes were traditionally the domain of hobbyists, many connected directly to the Internet (accessed via telnet), others were operated by government, educational, and research institutions. Fans of Usenet or the big commercial time-sharing bboards such as CompuServe, CIX and GEnie tended to consider local BBSes the low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they helped connect hackers and users in the personal-micro and let them exchange code. Use of this term for a Usenet newsgroup generally marks one either as a newbie fresh in from the BBS world or as a real old-timer predating Usenet.
  • businessman's holiday — busman's holiday.
  • by fair means or foul — If someone tries to achieve something by fair means or foul, they use every means possible in order to achieve it, and they do not care if their behaviour is dishonest or unfair.
  • cancellation deadline — A cancellation deadline is a date before which you must cancel a hotel reservation without paying any money.
  • canticle of canticles — another name for the Song of Solomon, used in the Douay Bible
  • cantilever foundation — a building foundation supporting its load partly or wholly upon cantilevers.
  • caroline of brunswick — 1768–1821, wife of George IV of the United Kingdom: tried for adultery (1820)
  • carrie chapman l catt — Carrie Chapman Lane, 1859–1947, U.S. leader in women's suffrage movements.
  • cascading style sheet — a file recording style details, such as fonts, colours, etc, that is read by browsers so that style is consistent over multiple web pages
  • casing collar locator — A casing collar locator is a tool that is placed down the borehole to allow depths to be measured by detecting the position of the casing collar.
  • castellon de la plana — a port in E Spain. Pop: 160 714 (2003 est)
  • catch one flat footed — having flatfeet.
  • caviar to the general — a thing appealing only to a highly cultivated taste: Hamlet II, ii
  • central daylight time — the time observed in the Central Time Zone of the United states when Daylight Savings Time is in effect; GMT -5
  • central european time — the standard time adopted by Western European countries one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, corresponding to British Summer Time
  • central limit theorem — any of several theorems stating that the sum of a number of random variables obeying certain conditions will assume a normal distribution as the number of variables becomes large.
  • central standard time — one of the standard times used in North America, based on the local time of the 90° meridian, six hours behind Greenwich Mean Time
  • character development — the portrayal of people in a work of fiction in such a way that the reader or audience seems to learn more about them as they develop
  • chequebook journalism — Chequebook journalism is the practice of paying people large sums of money for information about crimes or famous people in order to get material for newspaper articles.
  • chinese lantern plant — winter cherry (def 1).
  • chinese-lantern plant — a perennial ground-cherry (Physalis alkekengi) grown for winter bouquets because of the bladderlike red calyx that surrounds its small, tomatolike fruit
  • circle of declination — hour circle.
  • circular polarization — electromagnetic radiation (esp light) in which the electric field vector describes a circle about the direction of propagation at any point in the path of the radiation
  • civilian review board — a quasi-judicial board of appointed or elected citizens that investigates complaints against the police.
  • class-relation method — (programming)   A design technique based on the concepts of object-oriented programming and the Entity-Relationship model from the French company Softeam.
  • clayton antitrust act — an act of Congress in 1914 supplementing the Sherman Antitrust Act and establishing the FTC.
  • clayton-bulwer treaty — an agreement between the U.S. and Great Britain in 1850 guaranteeing that any canal built to connect the Atlantic and Pacific across Central America would be jointly controlled, open to all nations, and unfortified.
  • clean someone's clock — an instrument for measuring and recording time, especially by mechanical means, usually with hands or changing numbers to indicate the hour and minute: not designed to be worn or carried about.
  • clearance certificate — permission for a ship to use, leave, or enter a port
  • clement of alexandria — Saint. original name Titus Flavius Clemens. ?150–?215 ad, Greek Christian theologian: head of the catechetical school at Alexandria; teacher of Origen. Feast day: Dec 5
  • clinical psychologist — a practitioner of clinical psychology
  • clone-and-hack coding — case and paste
  • closed-angle glaucoma — angle-closure glaucoma. See under glaucoma.
  • collective bargaining — When a trade union engages in collective bargaining, it has talks with an employer about its members' pay and working conditions.
  • college of propaganda — information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc.
  • collimator viewfinder — a type of viewfinder in a camera
  • collins street farmer — a businessman who invests in farms, land, etc
  • column address strobe — (hardware)   (CAS) A signal sent from a processor (or memory controller) to a dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) (qv) circuit to indicate that the column address lines are valid.
  • column chromatography — the separation of mixtures into their constituents by preferential adsorption by a solid, as a column of silica (column chromatography) or a strip of filter paper (paper chromatography) or by a gel.
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