21-letter words containing c, a, g, o
- short message service — (messaging) (SMS) A message service offered by the GSM digital mobile telephone system. Using SMS, a short alphanumeric message (160 alphanumeric characters) can be sent to a mobile phone to be displayed there, much like in an alphanumeric pager system. The message is buffered by the GSM network until the phone becomes active.
- simple actor language — (language) (SAL) A minimal actor language, used for teaching in:
- siren call/siren song — A siren call or siren song is the appeal that something has although it is harmful or dangerous.
- social anthropologist — an anthropologist who deals with cultural and social phenomena such as kinship systems or beliefs, esp of nonliterate peoples
- strategic air command — a U.S. Air Force command charged with intercontinental air strikes, especially nuclear attacks.
- structural psychology — psychology centering on the analysis of the structure or content of conscious mental states by introspective methods.
- suction and curettage — a technique involving extraction of the fetus through a suction tube, used to perform abortions during the early stages of pregnancy.
- supergranulation cell — one of a number of large convection cells in the photosphere and chromosphere of the sun, each having a diameter of 10,000–20,000 miles (16,000–32,000 km) and lasting longer than a day.
- surface friction drag — the part of the drag on a body moving through a fluid that is dependent on the nature of the surface of the body
- teleological argument — the argument purporting to prove the existence of God from empirical facts, the premise being that the universe shows evidence of order and hence design
- the acting profession — actors considered as a group
- the icing on the cake — If you describe something as the icing on the cake, you mean that it makes a good thing even better, but it is not essential.
- the rock of gibraltar — a limestone promontory at the tip of S Spain
- the royal scots greys — (formerly) a British cavalry regiment, the Second Dragoons
- the shipping forecast — a radio broadcast made by the BBC of weather reports and forecasts for the seas around the British Isles
- threshold wage policy — a policy whereby wages are increased in accordance with inflation
- tide-generating force — the difference between the force of gravity exerted by the moon or the sun on a particle of water in the ocean and that exerted on an equal mass of matter at the centre of the earth. The lunar tide-generating forces are about 2.2 times greater than are the solar ones
- to change the subject — When someone involved in a conversation changes the subject, they start talking about something else, often because the previous subject was embarrassing.
- to get back to basics — to revert to a simpler method, eg of living or doing business
- to kill a mockingbird — a novel (1960) by Harper Lee.
- tool command language — (language) /tik*l/ (Tcl) An interpreted string processing language for issuing commands to interactive programs, developed by John Ousterhout at UCB. Each application program can extend tcl with its own set of commands. Tcl is like a text-oriented Lisp, but lets you write algebraic expressions for simplicity and to avoid scaring people away. Though originally designed to be a "scripting language" rather than for serious programming, Tcl has been used successfully for programs with hundreds of thousands of lines. It has a peculiar but simple syntax. It may be used as an embedded interpreter in application programs. It has exceptions and packages (called libraries), name-spaces for procedures and variables, and provide/require. It supports dynamic loading of object code. It is eight-bit clean. It has only three variable types: strings, lists and associative arrays but no structures. Tcl and its associated GUI toolkit, Tk run on all flavors of Unix, Microsoft Windows, Macintosh and VMS. Tcl runs on the Amiga and many other platforms. See also expect (control interactive programs and pattern match on their output), Cygnus Tcl Tools, [incr Tcl] (adds classes and inheritence to Tcl), Scriptics (John Ousterhout's company that is the home of Tcl development and the TclPro tool suite), Tcl Consortium (a non-profit agency dedicated to promoting Tcl), tclhttpd (an embeddable Tcl-based web server), tclx (adds many commands to Tcl), tcl-debug.
- topgallant forecastle — a partial weather deck on top of a forecastle superstructure; forecastle deck.
- topological invariant — a property of a topological space that is a property of every space related to the given space by a homeomorphism.
- total recoverable gas — Total recoverable gas is the amount of gas which is still left in the ground in gas fields that have already been worked.
- trades union congress — The Trades Union Congress in Britain is the same as the TUC.
- what price something? — what are the chances of something happening now?
- x-ray crystallography — the determination of the structure of a crystal by the use of x-ray diffraction.
- youth training scheme — (formerly, in Britain) a scheme, run by the Training Agency, to provide vocational training for unemployed 16–17-year-olds