18-letter words containing a, r, o, d
- british somaliland — a former British protectorate (1884–1960) in E Africa, on the Gulf of Aden: united with Italian Somaliland in 1960 to form Somalia (or the Somali Republic); in 1991 the self-styled republic of Somaliland, covering the same area as the former British Somaliland, declared itself independent and continues to function largely as a separate entity, though without international recognition
- broad-leaved maple — a maple, Acer macrophyllum, of western North America, characterized by dark green, thickened leaves that may reach 12 inches (30 cm) or more in width.
- broadcasting house — any of a number of buildings in the UK from which the BBC broadcasts or has broadcast
- bronchocandidiasis — See under candidiasis.
- butler's sideboard — a sideboard, often with a fall front, having on its top a china cabinet with glazed doors.
- camp david accords — a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt issuing from talks at Camp David between Egyptian President Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Begin, and the host, U.S. President Carter: signed in 1979.
- cape breton island — an island off SE Canada, in NE Nova Scotia, separated from the mainland by the Strait of Canso: its easternmost point is Cape Breton. Pop: 132 298 (2006). Area: 10 280 sq km (3970 sq miles)
- carbonic anhydrase — an enzyme in blood cells that catalyses the decomposition of carbonic acid into carbon dioxide and water, facilitating the transport of carbon dioxide from the tissues to the lungs
- carbonic-anhydride — carbon dioxide.
- carcinoid syndrome — the systemic effects, including flushing, palpitations, diarrhea, and cramps, resulting from increased blood levels of serotonin secreted by a carcinoid.
- career development — a progression through a series of jobs, each with more responsibility and a higher income than the last
- carolina chickadee — a chickadee, Parus carolinensis, of the southeastern U.S., resembling but smaller than the black-capped chickadee.
- cat's cry syndrome — a complex of congenital malformations in human infants caused by a chromosomal aberration and in which the infant emits a mewing cry.
- cathode dark space — Crookes dark space.
- cationic detergent — a type of detergent in which the active part of the molecule is a positive ion (cation). Cationic detergents are usually quaternary ammonium salts and often also have bactericidal properties
- ceiling decoration — a plaster moulding for the centre of a ceiling; other decoration, such as coving
- centralized school — a public school formed from the pupils and teachers of a number of discontinued smaller schools, especially in a rural district.
- cerebral dominance — the normal tendency for one half of the brain, usually the left cerebral hemisphere in right-handed people, to exercise more control over certain functions (e.g. handedness and language) than the other
- cerenkov radiation — radiation emitted when a charged particle travels through a medium at a speed greater than the speed of light through that medium
- character disorder — a disorder characterized by socially undesirable behavior, as poor control of impulses or inability to maintain close emotional relationships, and by absence of anxiety or guilt.
- character encoding — (character) (Or "character encoding scheme") A mapping between binary data values and character code positions (or "code points"). Early systems stored characters in a variety of ways, e.g. four six-bit characters in a 24-bit word, but around 1960, eight-bit bytes started to become the most common data storage layout, with each character stored in one byte, typically in the ASCII character set. In the case of ASCII, the character encoding is an identity mapping: code position 65 maps to the byte value 65. This is possible because ASCII uses only code positions representable as single bytes, i.e., values between 0 and 255. (US-ASCII only uses values 0 to 127, in fact.) From the late 1990s, there was increased use of larger character sets such as Unicode and many CJK coded character sets. These can represent characters from many languages and more symbols.
- chartered surveyor — (in Britain) a surveyor who is registered with the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors as having the qualifications, training, and experience to satisfy their professional requirements
- children of israel — the Jews; Hebrews
- chocolate-coloured — dark brown
- christian democrat — a member or supporter of a Christian Democratic party
- christian endeavor — an organization of young people of various evangelical Protestant churches, formed in 1881 to promote Christian principles and service.
- christian reformed — of or relating to a Protestant denomination (Christian Reformed Church) organized in the U.S. in 1857 by groups that had seceded from the Dutch Reformed Church.
- church of scotland — the established church in Scotland, Calvinist in doctrine and Presbyterian in constitution
- cigar-store indian — a wooden statue of an American Indian, traditionally displayed at the entrance of cigar stores.
- circular dichroism — selective absorption of one of the two possible circular polarizations of light.
- clay-colored robin — any of several small Old World birds having a red or reddish breast, especially Erithacus rubecula, of Europe.
- cleopatra's needle — either of two Egyptian obelisks, originally set up at Heliopolis about 1500 bc: one was moved to the Thames Embankment, London, in 1878, the other to Central Park, New York, in 1880
- closed corporation — a corporation the stock of which is owned by a small number of persons and is rarely traded on the open market
- closed scholarship — a scholarship for which only certain people, such as those from a particular school or with a particular surname, are eligible
- coast rhododendron — a rhododendron, Rhododendron macrophyllum, of western North America, having large clusters of rose-purple flowers spotted with brown: the state flower of Washington.
- coast-guard cutter — a cutter used by the U.S. Coast Guard.
- coastguard station — the headquarters or local offices of a coastguard
- collision diameter — the distance between the centers of two colliding molecules when at their closest point of approach.
- colorado red cedar — Rocky Mountain juniper.
- combined operation — a military operation carried out jointly by allied forces
- commander in chief — Also, Commander in Chief. the supreme commander of the armed forces of a nation or, sometimes, of several allied nations: The president is the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force.
- commander-in-chief — A commander-in-chief is a senior officer who is in charge of all the forces in a particular area.
- commanding officer — A commanding officer is an officer who is in charge of a military unit.
- commando operation — a major operation for treatment of cancer of the head and neck, involving removal of many facial structures and subsequent surgical reconstruction
- commedia dell'arte — a form of popular comedy developed in Italy during the 16th to 18th centuries, with stock characters such as Punchinello, Harlequin, and Columbine, in situations improvised from a plot outline
- common data format — (library) (CDF) A library and toolkit based on a self-describing data format for scalar and multidimensional data. CDF aims to be platform- and discipline-independent. A scientific data management package (CDF Library) allows developers to manage data and metadata through APIs. CDF has built-in support for data compression (gZip, RLE, Huffman) and files larger than two gigabytes. There are interfaces for C, FORTRAN, Java, Perl, C#, Visual Basic, IDL and MATLAB.
- common denominator — In mathematics, a common denominator is a number which can be divided exactly by all the denominators in a group of fractions.
- communication cord — a cord or chain in a train which may be pulled by a passenger to stop the train in an emergency
- comodoro rivadavia — a city in E Argentina.
- comparative method — a body of procedures and criteria used by linguists to determine whether and how two or more languages are related and to reconstruct forms of their hypothetical parent language.