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25-letter words containing a, n, t, i, r

  • black-crowned night heron — any of several thick-billed, crepuscular or nocturnal herons of the genus Nycticorax and related genera, as N. nycticorax (black-crowned night heron) of the Old and New Worlds, and Nyctanassa violacea (yellow-crowned night heron) of America.
  • blow someone's brains out — To blow someone's brains out means to shoot them in the head, killing them.
  • bring pressure to bear on — If you bring pressure or influence to bear on someone, you use it to try and persuade them to do something.
  • british union of fascists — the British fascist party founded by Sir Oswald Mosley (1932), which advocated a strong corporate state and promoted anti-Semitism
  • brute force and ignorance — (jargon)   (BFI) A popular design technique at many software houses - brute force coding unrelieved by any knowledge of how problems have been previously solved in elegant ways. Dogmatic adherence to design methods tends to encourage this sort of thing. Characteristic of early larval stage programming; unfortunately, many never outgrow it. Also encountered in the variants BFMI - brute force and massive ignorance, and BFBI - brute force and bloody ignorance. "Gak, they used a bubble sort! That's strictly BFI." Compare bogosity.
  • caltech intermediate form — (language)   (CIF) A geometry language for VLSI design, in which the primitives are coloured rectangles.
  • canyonlands national park — a national park in SE Utah, at the junction of the Colorado and Green rivers: site of geologic interest. 527 sq. mi. (1366 sq. km).
  • case integration services — (standard, programming)   (CIS) A committee formed to discuss CASE tool integration standards related to ATIS.
  • cauchy-schwarz inequality — Schwarz inequality (def 2).
  • certificate of enrollment — a document issued to a U.S. vessel of 20 tons gross or more, engaged in fishing or in trade along the U.S. coast, on the Great Lakes, or on U.S. inland waters.
  • certificate of unruliness — (in Britain) the decision of a juvenile court that a young person on remand is too unmanageable for local-authority care and should be taken into custody
  • character encoding scheme — character encoding
  • characteristic polynomial — an expression obtained from a given matrix by taking the determinant of the difference between the matrix and an arbitrary variable times the identity matrix.
  • cheshire west and chester — a unitary authority in NW England. Administrative centre: Chester. Pop: 328 100 (2008 est). Area: 917 sq km (354 sq miles)
  • cheyne-stokes respiration — respiration characterized by cycles of deep, rapid breathing and weak, slow breathing, as in cases of heart failure or coma
  • chief information officer — (job)   (CIO) The person who determines the overall strategic direction and business contribution of the information systems function in a business.
  • chief of naval operations — the highest officer in the U.S. Navy and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
  • child-resistant container — A child-resistant container is a container designed to be difficult for a child to open.
  • circle of least confusion — the smallest cross section in a beam of paraxial rays, lying in the plane of least spherical aberration.
  • co-ordinating conjunction — A co-ordinating conjunction is a word such as 'and', 'or', or 'but' which joins two or more words, groups, or clauses of equal status, for example two main clauses. Compare subordinating conjunction.
  • colony-stimulating factor — any of a number of substances, secreted by the bone marrow, that cause stem cells to proliferate and differentiate, forming colonies of specific blood cells. Synthetic forms are being tested for their ability to reduce the toxic effects of chemotherapy
  • commissioner of education — (in the US) the head of a state's education department
  • common object file format — (file format)   (COFF) The executable file and object file format used by Unix System V Release 3 and later.
  • commonwealth of australia — Australia's official title
  • communication engineering — the branch of engineering that deals with telecommunications and computer programming and networking.
  • compensated semiconductor — a semiconductor in which donors and acceptors are related in such a way that their opposing electrical effects are partially cancelled
  • complementarity principle — the principle that experiments on physical systems of atomic size or smaller, as electrons or photons, can exhibit either particle or wave behavior but not both simultaneously.
  • complete partial ordering — (theory)   (cpo) A partial ordering of a set under a relation, where all directed subsets have a least upper bound. A cpo is usually defined to include a least element, bottom (David Schmidt calls this a pointed cpo). A cpo which is algebraic and boundedly complete is a (Scott) domain.
  • computer-aided publishing — desktop publishing. Abbreviation: CAP.
  • conductiometric titration — a titration technique in which the end-point is determined by measuring the conductance of the solution
  • configuration programming — (programming)   An approach that advocates the use of a separate configuration language to specify the coarse-grain structure of programs. Configuration programming is particularly attractive for concurrent, parallel and distributed systems that have inherently complex program structures.
  • constant angular velocity — (storage)   (CAV) One of the two schemes for controlling the rate of rotation of the disk in a disk drive. Constant angular velocity keeps the rate of rotation constant. This means that the linear velocity of the disk under the head is larger when reading or writing the outer tracks. This in turn implies either a variation in the data rate to and from the heads or the bits per unit length along the track. The alternative, constant linear velocity, requires the rate of rotation of the disk to accelerate and decelerate according to the radial postion of the heads, increasing the energy use and vibration.
  • constant applicative form — (functional programming)   (CAF) A supercombinator which is not a lambda abstraction. This includes truly constant expressions such as 12, (+ 1 2), [1, 2, 3] as well as partially applied functions such as (+ 4). Note that this last example is equivalent under eta abstraction to \ x . + 4 x which is not a CAF. Since a CAF is a supercombinator, it contains no free variables. Moreover, since it is not a lambda abstraction it contains no variables at all. It may however contain identifiers which refer to other CAFs, e.g. c 3 where c = (* 2). A CAF can always be lifted to the top level of the program. It can either be compiled to a piece of graph which will be shared by all uses or to some shared code which will overwrite itself with some graph the first time it is evaluated. A CAF such as ints = from 1 where from n = n : from (n+1) can grow without bound but may only be accessible from within the code of one or more functions. In order for the garbage collector to be able to reclaim such structures, we associate with each function a list of the CAFs to which it refers. When garbage collecting a reference to the function we collect the CAFs on its list.
  • constructional homonymity — the property of a string of morphemes that is susceptible of two or more syntactic analyses, as in Flying planes can be dangerous, planes may be either the object of flying or the subject of can.
  • copenhagen interpretation — an interpretation of quantum mechanics developed by Niels Bohr and his colleagues at the University of Copenhagen, based on the concept of wave–particle duality and the idea that the observation influences the result of an experiment
  • court of general sessions — a local court with general jurisdiction, both civil and criminal.
  • crater lake national park — a national park in SW Oregon, in the Cascade Range: Crater Lake. 250 sq. mi. (648 sq. km).
  • crude oil degassing plant — A crude oil degassing plant is equipment that removes light ends such as methane and butane from crude oil.
  • crude oil pyrolysis plant — A crude oil pyrolysis plant is equipment used for converting waste and poor fuel to a better product by pyrolysis (= the use of heat to decompose organic material).
  • cut a person down to size — to reduce in importance or decrease the conceit of
  • data encryption algorithm — (DEA) An ANSI standard defined in ANSI X3.92-1981. It is identical to the Data Encryption Standard (DES).
  • data processing equipment — Data processing equipment is electrically operated equipment that accumulates, processes, and stores data.
  • dataphone digital service — (communications, product)   (DDS) The first private-line digital service offered by AT&T, with data rates typically at 2.4, 4.8, 9.6 and 56 kilobits per second. DDS is now part of AT&T's Accunet family of services. Most LEC (local exchange carriers) and IXC (IntereXchange Carriers) offer similar services.
  • decision support database — A database from which data is extracted and analysed statistically (but not modified) in order to inform business or other decisions. This is in contrast to an operational database which is being continuously updated. For example, a decision support database might provide data to determine the average salary of different types of workers, whereas an operational database containing the same data would be used to calculate pay check amounts. Often, decision support data is extracted from operation databases.
  • declaration of bankruptcy — a formal statement made by a company or individual to announce that they are bankrupt
  • declaration of indulgence — a royal grant during the reigns of Charles II and James II of England giving Nonconformists and Roman Catholics a measure of religious freedom
  • decreasing term insurance — Decreasing term insurance is life insurance with the amount of coverage decreasing over the term of the policy and a lump sum payment if you die in advance.
  • defense trade regulations — (legal)   The U.S. law governening munitions export and defense technology (F-16s, TOW missiles and cryptology). According to the U.S. (and Canada) cryptography is a munition and people who export it can be charged as though they were exporting bombs or state secrets. People have been. See also EFF.
  • defined contribution plan — A defined contribution plan is a type of pension plan that specifies the annual contribution that the employer will pay on behalf of each plan participant.
  • definite relative pronoun — a relative pronoun that refers to an antecedent, as who in It was I who told you.
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