18-letter words containing a, l, u
- catapult launching — the fact of launching aircraft into the air by a device installed in warships
- 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
- catskill mountains — a mountain range in SE New York State: resort. Highest peak: Slide Mountain, 1261 m (4204 ft)
- 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.
- celestial guidance — the guidance of a spacecraft or missile by reference to the position of one or more celestial bodies
- celestial latitude — the angular distance of a celestial body north or south from the ecliptic
- 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
- centum call second — (unit) (CCS) A unit used (in North America) to quantify the total traffic running in a network. 1 CCS is 100 call-seconds. That means 1 CCS could be 2 calls of 50 seconds duration or 20 calls of 5 seconds duration.
- 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.
- clean up one's act — to start to behave in a responsible manner
- cock-a-leekie soup — a soup made from a fowl boiled with leeks
- coffee-table music — unadventurous music
- colloidal solution — a mixture having particles of one component, with diameters between 10 −7 and 10 −9 metres, suspended in a continuous phase of another component. The mixture has properties between those of a solution and a fine suspension
- 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
- common-law husband — a man considered to be a woman's husband after the couple have cohabited for several years
- communication line — a line carrying communications
- community hospital — (in the US) a local hospital
- community language — a language spoken by members of a minority group or community within a majority language context
- complexity measure — (algorithm) A quantity describing the complexity of a computation.
- conceptual realism — the doctrine that universals have real and independent existence.
- conceptualisations — Plural form of conceptualisation.
- conceptualizations — Plural form of conceptualization.
- concrete universal — a principle that necessarily has universal import but is also concrete by virtue of its arising in historical situations.
- conjugate solution — a system of liquids, each partially miscible in the other, existing with a common interface, consisting of a saturated solution of one in the other.
- consequential loss — A consequential loss is a loss that follows another loss that is caused by a danger that has been insured against.
- 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.
- constitutional law — the body of law that evolves from a constitution, setting out the fundamental principles according to which a state is governed and defining the relationship between the various branches of government within the state.
- constitutionalized — Simple past tense and past participle of constitutionalize.
- 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