21-letter words containing c, o, e
- black-headed fireworm — the larva of any of several moths, as Rhopobota naevana (black-headed fireworm) which feeds on the leaves of cranberries and causes them to wither.
- blot on the landscape — If you describe something such as a building as a blot on the landscape, you mean that you think it is very ugly and spoils an otherwise attractive place.
- boiling-water reactor — a nuclear reactor using water as coolant and moderator, steam being produced in the reactor itself: enriched uranium oxide cased in zirconium is the fuel
- bonnie prince charlie — a member of the royal family that ruled in Scotland from 1371 to 1714 and in England from 1603 to 1714.
- book of common prayer — the official book of church services of the Church of England, until 1980, when the Alternative Service Book was sanctioned
- bottlebrush moustache — a short, bristly moustache
- box-office attraction — something or something that persuades people to buy tickets for a film or play
- breath-of-life packet — (XEROX PARC) An Ethernet packet that contains bootstrap code, periodically sent out from a working computer to infuse the "breath of life" into any computer on the network that has crashed. Computers depending on such packets have sufficient hardware or firmware code to wait for (or request) such a packet during the reboot process. See also dickless workstation. The notional "kiss-of-death packet", with a function complementary to that of a breath-of-life packet, is recommended for dealing with hosts that consume too many network resources. Though "kiss-of-death packet" is usually used in jest, there is at least one documented instance of an Internet subnet with limited address-table slots in a gateway computer in which such packets were routinely used to compete for slots, rather like Christmas shoppers competing for scarce parking spaces.
- british north america — (formerly) Canada or its constituent regions or provinces that formed part of the British Empire
- bryan-chamorro treaty — a treaty (1914) between the U.S. and Nicaragua by which the U.S. secured exclusive rights to build a canal across Nicaragua, to connect the Atlantic and Pacific.
- buffalo carpet beetle — any of several small beetles of the family Dermestidae, the larvae of which are household pests, feeding on rugs and other woolen fabrics, especially Anthrenus scrophulariae (buffalo carpet beetle) and Attagenus piceus (black carpet beetle)
- built-in obsolescence — a method of stimulating consumer demand by designing products that wear out or become outmoded after limited use.
- butterfly common lisp — A parallel version of Common LISP for the BBN Butterfly computer.
- byte-code interpreter — (software) A program that executes a byte code program. An example is the Java Virtual Machine.
- cancellation deadline — A cancellation deadline is a date before which you must cancel a hotel reservation without paying any money.
- canticle of canticles — another name for the Song of Solomon, used in the Douay Bible
- cantilever foundation — a building foundation supporting its load partly or wholly upon cantilevers.
- carlos saavedra lamas — Carlos [kahr-laws] /ˈkɑr lɔs/ (Show IPA), 1878?–1959, Argentine statesman and diplomat: Nobel Peace Prize 1936.
- caroline of brunswick — 1768–1821, wife of George IV of the United Kingdom: tried for adultery (1820)
- cartesian coordinates — a system of representing points in space in terms of their distance from a given origin measured along a set of mutually perpendicular axes. Written (x,y,z) with reference to three axes
- castellon de la plana — a port in E Spain. Pop: 160 714 (2003 est)
- catch one flat footed — having flatfeet.
- category merchandiser — A category merchandiser is a person whose job is to maintain stocks, manage displays and promote sales of a certain product category such as footwear.
- catherine of braganza — 1638–1705, wife of Charles II of England, daughter of John IV of Portugal
- caviar to the general — a thing appealing only to a highly cultivated taste: Hamlet II, ii
- central european time — the standard time adopted by Western European countries one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, corresponding to British Summer Time
- central limit theorem — any of several theorems stating that the sum of a number of random variables obeying certain conditions will assume a normal distribution as the number of variables becomes large.
- certificate authority — (cryptography, body) (CA or "Trusted Third Party") An entity (typically a company) that issues digital certificates to other entities (organisations or individuals) to allow them to prove their identity to others. A Certificate Authority might be an external company such as VeriSign that offers digital certificate services or they might be an internal organisation such as a corporate MIS department. The Certificate Authority's chief function is to verify the identity of entities and issue digital certificates attesting to that identity. The process uses public key cryptography to create a "network of trust". If I want to prove my identity to you, I ask a CA (who you trust to have verified my identity) to encrypt a hash of my signed key with their private key. Then you can use the CA's public key to decrypt the hash and compare it with a hash you calculate yourself. Hashes are used to decrease the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. The hash function must be cryptographically strong, e.g. MD5.
- certificate of origin — a document stating the name of the country that produced a specified shipment of goods: often required before importation of goods
- character development — the portrayal of people in a work of fiction in such a way that the reader or audience seems to learn more about them as they develop
- character recognition — Character recognition is a process which allows computers to recognize written or printed characters such as numbers or letters and to change them into a form that the computer can use.
- characteristic vector — a vector for which there exists a scalar such that the value of the vector under a given transformation is equal to the scalar times the vector.
- charge-coupled device — an electronic device, used in imaging and signal processing, in which information is represented as packets of electric charge that are stored in an array of tiny closely spaced capacitors and can be moved from one capacitor to another in a controlled way
- charity commissioners — (in Britain) members of a commission constituted to keep a register of charities and control charitable trusts
- charterhouse of parma — a novel (1839) by Stendhal.
- chequebook journalism — Chequebook journalism is the practice of paying people large sums of money for information about crimes or famous people in order to get material for newspaper articles.
- chief warrant officer — a senior-ranking warrant officer in various armed forces
- chinese forget-me-not — an eastern Asian plant, Cynoglossum amabile, of the borage family, having lance-shaped leaves and clustered, showy, blue, pink, or white flowers.
- chinese water torture — a form of torture in which water is made to drip for a long period of time onto a victim's forehead to drive him insane
- chink in one's armour — a small but fatal weakness
- chloroformyl chloride — phosgene.
- chocolate chip cookie — a biscuit containing chips of chocolate
- choledochojejunostomy — (medicine) The surgical formation of an opening between the common bile duct and the jejunum.
- christmas decorations — decorations of different kinds appropriate to Christmas, such as tinsel, candles, images of angels, etc.
- church-rosser theorem — (theory) A property of a reduction system that states that if an expression can be reduced by zero or more reduction steps to either expression M or expression N then there exists some other expression to which both M and N can be reduced. This implies that there is a unique normal form for any expression since M and N cannot be different normal forms because the theorem says they can be reduced to some other expression and normal forms are irreducible by definition. It does not imply that a normal form is reachable, only that if reduction terminates it will reach a unique normal form.
- circle of convergence — Mathematics. a circle associated with a given power series such that the series converges for all values of the variable inside the circle and diverges for all values outside it.
- circle of declination — hour circle.
- civil rights movement — campaign for human freedoms
- civilian review board — a quasi-judicial board of appointed or elected citizens that investigates complaints against the police.
- class-relation method — (programming) A design technique based on the concepts of object-oriented programming and the Entity-Relationship model from the French company Softeam.