19-letter words containing a, n, c, r
- multiplexor channel — (MPX) mainframe terminology for a slow peripheral device connection, e.g. for a printer, operator console, or card reader.
- munchausen syndrome — a factitious disorder in which otherwise healthy individuals seek to hospitalize themselves with feigned or self-induced pathology in order to receive surgical or other medical treatment.
- music to one's ears — something that is very pleasant to hear
- naberezhniye chelny — city in E European Russia, on the Kama River: pop. 514,000
- narcotics anonymous — an organization that helps drug users recover from drug addiction
- nasty piece of work — malicious person
- national characters — (character) Characters with accents and other diacritical marks that are used in certain written languages (that are based on the Roman alphabet) but not in others, particularly not in English. A standard list is ISO Latin 1.
- national coal board — a statutory corporation set up to run Britain's nationalised coal mining industry between 1947 and 1994, at which time the industry was privatized
- national curriculum — The National Curriculum is the course of study that most school pupils in England and Wales are meant to follow between the ages of 5 and 16.
- national serviceman — a soldier undertaking compulsory military service
- natural catastrophe — A natural catastrophe is an unexpected event, caused by nature, such as an earthquake or flood, in which there is a lot of suffering, damage, or death.
- natural killer cell — a small killer cell that destroys virus-infected cells or tumor cells without activation by an immune system cell or antibody.
- neats vs. scruffies — (artificial intelligence, jargon) The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in artificial intelligence research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; "neats" tend to try to build systems that "reason" in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while "scruffies" profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favour looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture "common sense" of living intelligences.
- necessary condition — prerequisite
- negative resistance — a characteristic of certain electronic components in which an increase in the applied voltage increases the resistance, producing a proportional decrease in current
- neighbourhood watch — a scheme under which members of a community agree together to take responsibility for keeping an eye on each other's property, as a way of preventing crime
- nerve growth factor — a protein that promotes the growth, organization, and maintenance of sympathetic and some sensory nerve cells. Abbreviation: NGF.
- neuropathologically — In a neuropathologic way.
- neuropsychodynamics — The theoretical synthesis of neuroscience and psychodynamics.
- neville chamberlain — (Arthur) Neville, 1869–1940, British statesman: prime minister 1937–40.
- new general catalog — a catalog of star clusters, galaxies, and other non-stellar objects, published in 1888
- nicolaus copernicus — Nicolaus [nik-uh-ley-uh s] /ˌnɪk əˈleɪ əs/ (Show IPA), (Mikolaj Kopernik) 1473–1543, Polish astronomer who promulgated the now accepted theory that the earth and the other planets move around the sun (the Copernican System)
- no strings attached — without conditions
- no-write allocation — (memory management) A cache policy where only processor reads are cached, thus avoiding the need for write-back or write-through.
- non causa pro causa — the fallacy of giving as a reason for a conclusion a proposition not actually relevant to that conclusion.
- non-confrontational — tending toward or ready for confrontation: They came to the meeting with a confrontational attitude.
- non-contemporaneous — living or occurring during the same period of time; contemporary.
- nonmaterial culture — the aggregate of values, mores, norms, etc., of a society; the ideational structure of a culture that provides the values and meanings by which it functions.
- nonplayer character — a character in a tabletop role-playing game who is controlled by the Game Master.
- north pacific ocean — the northern part of the Pacific Ocean, extending from the equator to the Arctic Ocean.
- north-central state — a state of N Nigeria. Capital: Kaduna. Pop: 4 438 007 (1995 est). Area: 46 053 sq km (17 781 sq miles)
- northwest ordinance — the act of Congress in 1787 providing for the government of the Northwest Territory and setting forth the steps by which its subdivisions might become states.
- not care/give a fig — If you say that someone doesn't care a fig or doesn't give a fig about something, you are emphasizing that they think it is unimportant or that they are not interested in it.
- not worth a cracker — worthless; useless
- not worth a crumpet — utterly worthless
- noughts and crosses — tick-tack-toe (def 1).
- noughts-and-crosses — tick-tack-toe (def 1).
- nuclear disarmament — the gradual reduction and eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons in the world
- nuclear power plant — factory that generates atomic energy
- occupation grouping — a category in a system of classifying people according to occupation, based originally on information obtained by government census and subsequently developed by market research. The classifications are used by the advertising industry to identify potential markets. The groups are A, B, C1, C2, D, and E
- occupational hazard — a danger or hazard to workers that is inherent in a particular occupation: Silicosis is an occupational hazard of miners.
- oceanus procellarum — (Ocean of Storms) the largest dark plain on the face of the moon, in the second and third quadrants: about 2 million square miles (5.2 million sq. km).
- of one's own accord — to be in agreement or harmony; agree.
- old church slavonic — the oldest attested Slavic language, an ecclesiastical language written first by Cyril and Methodius in a Bible translation of the 9th century and continued in use for about two centuries. It represents the South Slavic, Bulgarian dialect of 9th-century Salonika with considerable addition of other South and West Slavic elements. Abbreviation: OCS.
- on (or off) camera — so positioned as to be within (or out of) the camera's field of view
- on no consideration — for no reason whatsoever; never
- open-hearth furnace — a process of steelmaking in which the charge is laid in a furnace (open-hearth furnace) on a shallow hearth and heated directly by burning gas as well as radiatively by the furnace walls.
- open-hearth process — a process of steelmaking in which the charge is laid in a furnace (open-hearth furnace) on a shallow hearth and heated directly by burning gas as well as radiatively by the furnace walls.
- operations director — a director or senior manager who oversees the efficiency of business operations
- operations research — the analysis, usually involving mathematical treatment, of a process, problem, or operation to determine its purpose and effectiveness and to gain maximum efficiency.