21-letter words containing c, o, t, r, a, n
- rap over the knuckles — to reprimand
- rattle someone's cage — to upset or anger someone
- reciprocal inhibition — the theory that the pairing of an anxiety-provoking stimulus with anxiety-reducing reactions will weaken the association between the stimulus and the anxiety.
- reconnaissance flight — a flight made by an aircraft in order to obtain military information about a particular place
- reconnaissance patrol — a patrol made by soldiers in order to obtain military information about a particular place
- record of achievement — a statement of the personal and educational development of each pupil
- rectangular hyperbola — a hyperbola with perpendicular asymptotes
- redevelopment company — a private corporation or a public agency that stimulates the improvement of land, as through a building project subject to certain designs and controls, by financing, selling, or leasing such real estate to interested buyers or lessees.
- registration document — a document giving identification details of a motor vehicle, including its manufacturer, date of registration, engine and chassis numbers, and owner's name
- rehabilitation centre — a centre or clinic where people with an alcohol or drug addiction are treated
- reinforcement therapy — a behavior modification technique in which appropriate behavior is strengthened through systematic reinforcement.
- relaxation oscillator — a nonsinusoidal oscillator, the timing of which is controlled by the charge and discharge time constants of resistance and capacitance components
- replacement algorithm — The method used to determine which entry in an associative cache to flush to main memory when it is desired to cache a new block of data. The "least recently used" algorithm flushed the block which has not been accessed for the longest time. A random replacement algorithm picks any block with equal probability.
- retarded acceleration — velocity increase constrained by opposing forces such as wind resistance or braking
- reverberation chamber — a room with walls that reflect sound. It is used to make acoustic measurements and as a source of reverberant sound to be mixed with direct sound for recording or broadcasting
- reverberatory furnace — See at reverberatory (def 2).
- ring down the curtain — to lower the curtain at the end of a theatrical performance
- road traffic accident — an accident involving vehicles
- rocky mountain locust — a migratory locust, Melanoplus spretus, that occurs in North America, especially the Great Plains, where swarms cause great damage to crops and other vegetation.
- rocky mountain oyster — mountain oyster.
- roman catholic church — the Christian church of which the pope, or bishop of Rome, is the supreme head.
- royal victorian order — (in Britain) an order of chivalry founded by Queen Victoria in 1896, membership of which is conferred for special services to the sovereign
- rutherford scattering — the scattering of an alpha particle through a large angle with respect to the original direction of motion of the particle, caused by an atom (Rutherford atom) with most of the mass and all of the positive electric charge concentrated at a center or nucleus.
- s-k reduction machine — An abstract machine defined by Professor David Turner to evaluate combinator expressions represented as binary graphs. Named after the two basic combinators, S and K.
- saint anthony's cross — tau cross.
- sao tome and principe — Democratic Republic of, a republic in W Africa, comprising the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, in the Gulf of Guinea, N of the equator: a former overseas province of Portugal; gained independence in 1975. 372 sq. mi. (964 sq. km). Capital: São Tomé.
- saponification number — the number of milligrams of potassium hydroxide required to saponify one gram of a given ester, especially a glyceride.
- satisficing behaviour — the form of behaviour demonstrated by firms who seek satisfactory profits and satisfactory growth rather than maximum profits
- scalar multiplication — an operation used in the definition of a vector space in which the product of a scalar and a vector is a vector, the operation is distributive over the addition of both scalars and vectors, and is associative with multiplication of scalars
- scarlet monkey flower — any of various plants belonging to the genus Mimulus, of the figwort family, as M. cardinalis (scarlet monkey flower) having spotted flowers that resemble a face.
- schlieren photography — a type of photography which records schlieren
- scintillation counter — a device for detecting and measuring radioactivity, having a crystal scintillator, a photoelectric cell sensitive to the light from scintillations, and an amplifier.
- secondary containment — Secondary containment is a system for dealing with hazardous spills.
- self-characterization — portrayal; description: the actor's characterization of a politician.
- seventeen-year locust — a cicada, Magicicada septendecim, of the eastern U.S., having nymphs that live in the soil, usually emerging in great numbers after 17 years in the North or 13 years in the South.
- sheppard's correction — a method of correcting the bias in standard deviations and higher moments of distributions that arises from grouping values of the variable.
- silicon tetrachloride — a colorless, fuming liquid, SiCl 4 , used chiefly for making smoke screens and various derivatives of silicon.
- silicon tetrafluoride — a colorless, fuming gas, SiF 4 , used chiefly in the manufacture of fluosilicic acid.
- simple actor language — (language) (SAL) A minimal actor language, used for teaching in:
- sinusoidal projection — an equal-area projection in which parallels are straight lines spaced at regular intervals, the central meridian is a straight line one-half the length of the equator, and the other meridians are curves symmetrical to the central meridian.
- snr bandwidth product — (communications) The integral of the SNR over frequency. The SNR bandwidth product is an important limit in the capacity of a communication channel.
- social administration — the administration and maintenance of issues to do with social policies and welfare
- social anthropologist — an anthropologist who deals with cultural and social phenomena such as kinship systems or beliefs, esp of nonliterate peoples
- social inquiry report — (in Britain) a report on a person and his or her circumstances, which may be required by a court before sentencing and is made by a probation officer or a social worker from a local authority social services department
- social stratification — the act or an instance of stratifying.
- somatotrophic-hormone — a hormone secreted by the anterior pituitary gland, that stimulates growth in humans.
- south pacific current — an ocean current that flows E in the South Pacific Ocean parallel to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
- special correspondent — a journalist who covers stories firsthand from a war zone
- spherical coordinates — Usually, spherical coordinates. any of three coordinates used to locate a point in space by the length of its radius vector and the angles this vector makes with two perpendicular polar planes.
- stabilization-process — the act or process of stabilizing or the state of being stabilized.