14-letter words containing c, n
- auction bridge — a variety of bridge, now generally superseded by contract bridge, in which all the tricks made score towards the game
- audience share — the percentage of households with television sets in use or tuned to a particular station during a specific period of time.
- auditory canal — the narrow passageway from the outer ear to the eardrum.
- auger-electron — a nonradiative process in which an atom in an excited state undergoes a transition to a lower state by the emission of a bound electron (Auger electron) rather than by the emission of an x-ray.
- auspiciousness — The state or quality of being auspicious or successful.
- authenticating — to establish as genuine.
- authentication — to establish as genuine.
- autoactivation — (biochemistry) autocatalysis.
- autoconfiscate — (software, jargon) A term coined by Noah Friedman meaning to set up or modify a source-code distribution so that it configures and builds using the GNU project's autoconf/automake/libtools suite.
- autocovariance — (statistics) The covariance of a signal with another part of the same signal.
- autodesk, inc. — (company) The distributors of the AutoCAD CAD package. Address: Sausalito, CA, USA.
- avalanche lily — a wildflower (Erythronium montanum) of the lily family, native to the mountain meadows of Washington and Oregon and blooming in June among the melting snowbanks
- avalanche wind — the wind that is created in front of an avalanche.
- avariciousness — The state or quality of being avaricious.
- aviation cadet — one who trains to become an officer in an air force.
- avoidance play — a play by the declarer designed to prevent a particular opponent from taking the lead.
- award ceremony — ceremony at which an award is presented
- back and forth — If someone moves back and forth, they repeatedly move in one direction and then in the opposite direction.
- back clearance — runout (def 1b).
- back formation — the invention of a new word on the assumption that a familiar word is derived from it. The verbs edit and burgle were so created from editor and burglar
- back o' beyond — remote; out-of-the-way; isolated.
- back of beyond — a very remote place
- back to nature — If you want to get back to nature, you want to return to a simpler way of living.
- back-and-forth — backward and forward; side to side; to and fro: a back-and-forth shuttling of buses to the stadium; the back-and-forth movement of a clock's pendulum.
- back-clearance — Machinery. the gradual termination of a groove on the body of an object not ending there, as the upper termination of a flute in a twist drill. Also called back clearance. a space in a depressed area of an object into which a machine tool or grinding wheel may safely enter at the end of a pass or operation.
- back-formation — the analogical creation of one word from another word that appears to be a derived or inflected form of the first by dropping the apparent affix or by modification.
- back-pedalling — a retreat from or a retraction of a previously held view
- backbone cabal — (networking) A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the Great Renaming and reined in the chaos of Usenet during most of the 1980s. The cabal mailing list disbanded in late 1988 after a bitter internal cat-fight.
- backbreakingly — In a backbreaking manner.
- backflap hinge — Building Trades. flap (def 20a).
- backhandedness — The quality of being backhanded; the use of indirect tactics.
- backing singer — a singer providing a vocal accompaniment for a pop singer or pop number
- backing vocals — a vocal accompaniment for a pop singer
- backscattering — the scattering of rays or particles at angles to the original direction of motion of greater than 90°
- backscratching — a long-handled device for scratching one's own back.
- backside-front — backend-to.
- backup pumpkin — pumpkin
- bactrian camel — a two-humped camel, Camelus bactrianus, used as a beast of burden in the cold deserts of central Asia
- balance bridge — a bascule bridge
- balance spring — hairspring.
- balance weight — a weight used in machines to counterbalance a part, as of a crankshaft
- balanced valve — a valve designed so that pressure-induced forces from the fluid being controlled oppose one another so that resistance to opening and closing the valve is negligible.
- ball and chain — (formerly) a heavy iron ball attached to a chain and fastened to a prisoner
- ball indicator — a flight instrument that measures the angle of roll about an aircraft's horizontal axis, thereby indicating whether or not the aircraft is skidding or slipping.
- ball-and-chain — a heavy iron ball fastened by a chain to a prisoner's leg.
- ballistic wind — a single wind vector that would have the same net effect on the trajectory of a projectile as the varying winds encountered in flight.
- ballroom dance — a social dance, popular since the beginning of the 20th century, in conventional rhythms, such as the foxtrot and the quickstep
- balsaminaceous — of, relating to, or belonging to the Balsaminaceae, a family of flowering plants, including balsam and touch-me-not, that have irregular flowers and explosive capsules
- balto-slavonic — a hypothetical subfamily of Indo-European languages consisting of Baltic and Slavonic. It is now generally believed that similarities between them result from geographical proximity rather than any special relationship
- bamboo curtain — (esp in the 1950s and 1960s) the political and military barrier to communications around the People's Republic of China