18-letter words containing a, l, u, r
- best-ball foursome — a match, scored by holes, between two pairs of players, in which the score of the lower scoring member of each pair is taken as their score for the hole.
- blackback flounder — any of various popular food flatfishes, as Parophrys vetulus of the Pacific (English sole) and Pseudopleuronectes americanus of the Atlantic (winter flounder or blackback flounder)
- blissful ignorance — unawareness or inexperience of something unpleasant
- blue-collar worker — a manual industrial worker
- break your silence — If someone breaks their silence about something, they talk about something that they have not talked about before or for a long time.
- bring-and-buy sale — A bring-and-buy sale is an informal sale to raise money for a charity or other organization. People who come to the sale bring things to be sold and buy things that other people have brought.
- building materials — materials such as bricks, cement, timber, etc
- burkitt's lymphoma — a cancer characterized by tumors containing lymphoid cells, occurring esp. in children, in the jaw, eyes, and internal organs: it is associated with the Epstein-Barr virus
- butler's sideboard — a sideboard, often with a fall front, having on its top a china cabinet with glazed doors.
- butterhead lettuce — a major group of lettuce varieties having soft, pliable leaves and small, loose heads, including bibb and Boston lettuce
- calcium propionate — a white, water-soluble powder, CaC 6 H 10 O 4 , used in bakery products to inhibit the growth of fungi.
- california current — a cold current originating in the northern part of the Pacific Ocean, flowing SE along the coast of W North America.
- california fuchsia — a North American onagraceous plant, Zauschneria californica, with tubular scarlet flowers
- california-fuchsia — a plant belonging to the genus Fuchsia, of the evening primrose family, including many varieties cultivated for their handsome drooping flowers.
- camel's-hair brush — an artist's small brush, made of hair from a squirrel's tail
- cartilaginous fish — any fish of the class Chondrichthyes, including the sharks, skates, and rays, having a skeleton composed entirely of cartilage
- casualty insurance — insurance providing coverage against accident and property damages, as automobile, theft, liability, and explosion insurance, but not including life insurance, fire insurance, or marine insurance.
- catalogue raisonne — a descriptive catalogue, esp one covering works of art in an exhibition or collection
- caterpillar hunter — any of various carabid beetles of the genus Calosoma, of Europe and North America, which prey on the larvae of moths and butterflies
- cauliflower cheese — a dish of cauliflower with a cheese sauce, eaten hot
- cauliflower fungus — a large edible white to yellowish cauliflowerlike mushroom, Sparassis radicata, widely distributed in North America.
- cellular automaton — (algorithm, parallel) (CA, plural "- automata") A regular spatial lattice of "cells", each of which can have any one of a finite number of states. The state of all cells in the lattice are updated simultaneously and the state of the entire lattice advances in discrete time steps. The state of each cell in the lattice is updated according to a local rule which may depend on the state of the cell and its neighbors at the previous time step. Each cell in a cellular automaton could be considered to be a finite state machine which takes its neighbours' states as input and outputs its own state. The best known example is J.H. Conway's game of Life.
- cellular telephone — a mobile phone
- centrifugal clutch — an automatic clutch in which the friction surfaces are engaged by weighted levers acting under centrifugal force at a certain speed of rotation
- chambered nautilus — nautilus (def 1).
- character-building — improving certain good or useful traits in a person's character, esp self-reliance, endurance, and courage
- children's crusade — a crusade to recover Jerusalem from the Saracens, undertaken in 1212 by thousands of French and German children who perished, were sold into slavery, or were turned back.
- chlorofluorocarbon — Chlorofluorocarbons are the same as CFCs.
- chocolate-coloured — dark brown
- church of scotland — the established church in Scotland, Calvinist in doctrine and Presbyterian in constitution
- cicatricial tissue — scar tissue.
- circular breathing — a technique for sustaining a phrase on a wind instrument, using the cheeks to force air out of the mouth while breathing in through the nose
- circular dichroism — selective absorption of one of the two possible circular polarizations of light.
- circulating medium — currency serving as a medium of exchange
- circulatory system — the system concerned with the transport of blood and lymph, consisting of the heart, blood vessels, lymph vessels, etc
- circumnavigational — Relating to circumnavigation.
- citizen journalism — the involvement of non-professionals in reporting news, esp in blogs and other websites
- clark's nutcracker — a nutcracker, Nucifraga columbiana, of western North America, having pale gray plumage and black and white wings and tail.
- claustrophobically — In a claustrophobic way.
- colour commentator — a sports celebrity who works as part of a commentary team
- colour photography — the art or process of taking and developing photographs in colour
- colour temperature — the temperature of a black-body radiator at which it would emit radiation of the same chromaticity as the light under consideration
- complexity measure — (algorithm) A quantity describing the complexity of a computation.
- conceptual realism — the doctrine that universals have real and independent existence.
- concrete universal — a principle that necessarily has universal import but is also concrete by virtue of its arising in historical situations.
- considered harmful — (programming, humour) A type of phrase based on the title of Edsger W. Dijkstra's famous note in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM, "Goto Statement Considered Harmful", which fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars. Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by policy) no longer print articles taking so assertive a position against a coding practice. In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and parodies bore titles of the form "X considered Y". The structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the realisation that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke.
- cool as a cucumber — very calm; self-possessed
- coronary occlusion — partial or total obstruction of a coronary artery, as by a thrombus, usually resulting in infarction of the myocardium.
- corpuscular theory — the theory, originally proposed by Newton, and revived with the development of the quantum theory, that light consists of a stream of particles
- couldn't care less — If you say that you couldn't care less about someone or something, you are emphasizing that you are not interested in them or worried about them. In American English, you can also say that you could care less, with the same meaning.