21-letter words containing a, n, l, e, m
- closed-angle glaucoma — angle-closure glaucoma. See under glaucoma.
- 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.
- combination principle — Ritz combination principle.
- comfortably-furnished — containing comfortable furniture
- commercial television — television companies which make money by selling advertising
- commercial translator — (language) An English-like pre-COBOL language for business data processing.
- committal proceedings — a preliminary hearing in a magistrates' court to decide if there is a case to answer
- completing the square — a method, usually of solving quadratic equations, by which a quadratic expression, as x 2 − 4 x + 3, is written as the sum or difference of a perfect square and a constant, x 2 − 4 x + 4 + 3 − 4 = (x − 2) 2 − 1, by addition and subtraction of appropriate constant terms.
- componential analysis — the analysis of a set of related linguistic items, especially word meanings, into combinations of features in terms of which each item may be compared with every other, as in the analysis of man into the semantic features “male,” “mature,” and “human,” woman into “female,” “mature,” and “human,” girl into “female,” “immature,” and “human,” and bull into “male,” “mature,” and “bovine.”.
- consultation document — a report that is the result of a consultation process
- conventional medicine — the type of medicine that is generally used in the US and Europe which uses drugs and surgery as a form of treatment
- conventional mortgage — A conventional mortgage is a fixed rate mortgage with a standard term of 15, 20, or 30 years.
- conway's game of life — (simulation) The first popular cellular automata based artificial life simulation. Life was invented by British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970 and was first introduced publicly in "Scientific American" later that year. Conway first devised what he called "The Game of Life" and "ran" it using plates placed on floor tiles in his house. Because of he ran out of floor space and kept stepping on the plates, he later moved to doing it on paper or on a checkerboard and then moved to running Life as a computer program on a PDP-7. That first implementation of Life as a computer program was written by M. J. T. Guy and S. R. Bourne (the author of Unix's Bourne shell). Life uses a rectangular grid of binary (live or dead) cells each of which is updated at each step according to the previous state of its eight neighbours as follows: a live cell with less than two, or more than three, live neighbours dies. A dead cell with exactly three neighbours becomes alive. Other cells do not change. While the rules are fairly simple, the patterns that can arise are of a complexity resembling that of organic systems -- hence the name "Life". Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with Life, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented Life in TECO!; see Gosperism). When a hacker mentions "life", he is more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, the 1950s-era board game or the human state of existence.
- coronal mass ejection — a cloud of particles ejected from the sun's surface during a solar flare
- cosmological argument — one of the arguments that purport to prove the existence of God from empirical facts about the universe, esp the argument to the existence of a first cause
- countably compact set — a set for which every cover consisting of a countable number of sets has a subcover consisting of a finite number of sets.
- court of common pleas — (formerly) a superior court exercising jurisdiction in civil actions between private citizens
- criminal conversation — (formerly) a common law action brought by a husband by which he claimed damages against an adulterer
- cyclical unemployment — unemployment caused by fluctuations in the level of economic activity inherent in trade cycles
- demand-pull inflation — inflation in which rising demand results in a rise in prices.
- democratic centralism — the Leninist principle that policy should be decided centrally by officials, who are nominally democratically elected
- denominational school — a school associated with a particular religious denomination
- designated employment — (in Britain) any of certain kinds of jobs reserved for handicapped workers under the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act 1944
- development education — an area of study that aims to give pupils an understanding of their involvement in world affairs
- developmental biology — the study of the development of multicellular organisms, including the study of the earliest stages of embryonic structure and tissue differentiation
- differential geometry — the branch of mathematics that deals with the application of the principles of differential and integral calculus to the study of curves and surfaces.
- disestablishmentarian — a person who favors the separation of church and state, especially the withdrawal of special rights, status, and support granted an established church by a state; an advocate of disestablishing a state church.
- displacement activity — a behavior performed out of its usual context and apparently irrelevant to the prevailing situation, as eating when an unknown individual approaches, tending to occur when appropiate behaviors, as attacking or fleeing, are in conflict or obstructed.
- display advertisement — an advertisement designed to attract attention by using devices such as conspicuous or elegant typefaces, graphics, etc
- drop in someone's lap — give someone the responsibility of
- dumfries and galloway — a region in S Scotland. 2460 sq. mi. (6371 sq. km).
- dynamic drive overlay — (storage, software) (DDO) Software to allow a system BIOS that does not support Logical Block Addressing to access drives larger than 528 MB. The alternatives are to update the system BIOS or install an EIDE controller card with a suitable on-board BIOS.
- eastern daylight time — a time zone applicable to many eastern areas of the United States during the summer months, being a daylight-saving variant of Eastern Standard Time
- electric displacement — the electric flux density when an electric field exists in free space into which a dielectric is introduced
- electroencephalograms — Plural form of electroencephalogram.
- electromagnetic field — a field of force associated with a moving electric charge equivalent to an electric field and a magnetic field at right angles to each other and to the direction of propagation
- electromagnetic pulse — a surge of electromagnetic radiation, esp one resulting from a nuclear explosion, which can disrupt electronic devices and, occasionally, larger structures and equipment
- electronystagmography — A diagnostic test to record involuntary movements of the eye caused by a condition known as nystagmus. It can also be used to diagnose the cause of vertigo, dizziness or balance dysfunction by testing the vestibular system.
- emotional correctness — pressure on an individual to be seen to feel the same emotion as others
- empire state building — New York City skyscraper
- endoplasmic reticulum — an extensive intracellular membrane system whose functions include synthesis and transport of lipids and, in regions where ribosomes are attached, of proteins
- enharmonic modulation — a change of key achieved by regarding a note in one key as an equivalent note in another. Thus E flat in the key of A flat could be regarded as D sharp in the key of B major
- environmental studies — a university course studying the environment and related issues
- epidemic encephalitis — any type of widespread encephalitis caused by various viruses
- faculty board meeting — a meeting of the governing body of a faculty
- false memory syndrome — a psychological condition in which a person believes that he or she remembers events that have not actually occurred.
- false-memory syndrome — a psychological condition in which a person believes that he or she remembers events that have not actually occurred.
- feline leukemia virus — a retrovirus, mainly affecting cats, that depresses the immune system and leads to opportunistic infections, lymphosarcoma, and other disorders. Abbreviation: FeLV, FLV.