15-letter words containing a, y, u
- countercyclical — having the effect of checking or reversing fluctuations in the national economy or the finances of a business
- counterstrategy — a strategy designed to counter the effectiveness of another strategy or action
- country cottage — a small house in the country, esp one used for holidays
- country dancing — Country dancing is traditional dancing in which people dance in rows or circles.
- county palatine — the lands of a count palatine
- couples therapy — a counseling procedure that attempts to improve the adaptation and adjustment of two people who form a conjugal unit.
- cranberry gourd — a South American vine, Abobra tenuifolia, of the gourd family, having deeply lobed, ovate leaves and bearing a berrylike scarlet fruit.
- cranberry juice — the juice of cranberries
- cranberry sauce — a sauce made from cranberries, often eaten with turkey
- crepuscular ray — a twilight ray of sunlight shining through breaks in high clouds and illuminating dust particles in the air.
- cricopharyngeus — (anatomy) Part of the inferior pharyngeal constrictor, arising from the cricoid cartilage.
- crude tank yard — A crude tank yard is a place where tanks of crude oil are stored.
- crunchy granola — crisp; brittle.
- crunchy-granola — characterized by or defining oneself by ecological awareness, liberal political views, and support or use of natural products and health foods.
- crystal counter — an instrument for detecting and measuring the intensity of high-energy radiation, in which particles collide with a crystal and momentarily increase its conductivity
- crystal nucleus — the tiny crystal that forms at the onset of crystallization
- crystal pick-up — a record-player pick-up in which the current is generated by the deformation of a piezoelectric crystal caused by the movements of the stylus
- crystalliferous — producing or containing crystals
- curiosity value — value arising from rarity or strangeness rather than intrinsic worth
- currency market — a market in which banks and traders purchase and sell foreign currencies
- currency trader — a person whose work is to trade currencies and profit from exchange rate differentials
- cyanide capsule — a capsule containing cyanide, traditionally given to spies and others so that they can commit suicide to avoid capture
- cyber-squatting — (jargon, networking) The practice of registering famous brand names as Internet domain names, e.g. harrods.com, ibm.firm or sears.shop, in the hope of later selling them to the appropriate owner at a profit.
- cyclone furnace — a furnace burning liquid or pulverized fuel in a whirling air column.
- cytomegalovirus — a virus of the herpes virus family that may cause serious disease in patients whose immune systems are compromised
- daguerreotyping — Present participle of daguerreotype.
- daguerreotypist — an obsolete photographic process, invented in 1839, in which a picture made on a silver surface sensitized with iodine was developed by exposure to mercury vapor.
- dark-eyed junco — a common North American junco, Junco hyemalis, having a pink bill, gray and brown body plumage, white belly and outer tail feathers, and differing from other species of junco in having a dark brown rather than yellow iris.
- data redundancy — (data, communications, storage) Any technique that stores or transmits extra, derived data that can be used to detect or repair errors, either in hardware or software. Examples are parity bits and the cyclic redundancy check. If the cost of errors is high enough, e.g. in a safety-critical system, redundancy may be used in both hardware AND software with three separate computers programmed by three separate teams ("triple redundancy") and some system to check that they all produce the same answer, or some kind of majority voting system. The term is not typically used for other, less beneficial, duplication of data. 2. (communications) The proportion of a message's gross information content that can be eliminated without losing essential information. Technically, redundancy is one minus the ratio of the actual uncertainty to the maximum uncertainty. This is the fraction of the structure of the message which is determined not by the choice of the sender, but rather by the accepted statistical rules governing the choice of the symbols in question.
- day in, day out — If you say that something happens day in, day out or day in and day out, you mean that it happens regularly over a long period of time.
- day of judgment — Judgment Day
- dean of faculty — the president of the Faculty of Advocates in Scotland
- delayed neutron — a neutron produced in a nuclear reactor by the breakdown of a fission product and released a short time after neutrons produced in the primary process
- diallyl sulfide — allyl sulfide.
- dionysius thrax — c100 b.c, Greek grammarian.
- disquisitionary — of or relating to a disquisition
- disreputability — The state of being disreputable.
- distinguishably — to mark off as different (often followed by from or by): He was distinguished from the other boys by his height.
- do your head in — If something or someone does your head in, they make you angry or frustrated.
- domain maturity — (systems analysis) The level of stability and depth of understanding that has been achieved in an area for which applications are developed.
- double jeopardy — the subjecting of a person to a second trial or punishment for the same offense for which the person has already been tried or punished.
- dougherty wagon — a horse- or mule-drawn passenger wagon having doors on the side, transverse seats, and canvas sides that can be rolled down.
- dramaturgically — the craft or the techniques of dramatic composition.
- duty to retreat — a legal principle that requires a person as a first response to back away or flee from a threatening situation rather than attempt self-defense by deadly force: Duty to retreat has always been a debatable doctrine.
- dynamic routing — (networking) (Or "adaptive routing") Routing that adjusts automatically to network topology or traffic changes.
- dysfunctionally — not performing normally, as an organ or structure of the body; malfunctioning.
- economy measure — any method of reducing expenditure and hence saving money
- eleutherodactyl — (of a bird) having the hind toe free
- enumerated type — (programming) (Or "enumeration") A type which includes in its definition an exhaustive list of possible values for variables of that type. Common examples include Boolean, which takes values from the list [true, false], and day-of-week which takes values [Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday]. Enumerated types are a feature of strongly typed languages, including C and Ada. Characters, (fixed-size) integers and even floating-point types could be (but are not usually) considered to be (large) enumerated types.
- estuary english — a variety of standard British English in which the pronunciation reflects various features characteristic of London and the Southeast of England