19-letter words containing c, s, r
- micromesh stockings — stockings made from a material consisting of a fine mesh
- miniature schnauzer — one of a German breed of sturdily built terriers resembling a smaller version of the standard schnauzer, having a wiry, pepper-and-salt, black, or black-and-silver coat, a rectangular head, bushy whiskers, and a docked tail, and originally developed as a farm dog but now raised primarily as a pet.
- ministry of defence — the government department responsible for the country's military measures or resources
- minor seventh chord — a chord consisting of a minor triad with an added minor seventh above the root
- miracle of st. mark — a painting (1548) by Tintoretto.
- mischaracterization — The act of characterizing something in an inaccurate or misleading way.
- missouri compromise — an act of Congress (1820) by which Missouri was admitted as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and slavery was prohibited in the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30′N, except for Missouri.
- missouri meerschaum — corncob (def 2).
- molecular astronomy — the branch of astronomy dealing with the study of molecules in space.
- molecular biologist — a specialist in the study of biological phenomena at the molecular level
- moses-in-the-cradle — a plant, Rhoeo spathacea, native to the West Indies and Central America, having leaves with purple undersides and white flowers enclosed in a boat-shaped envelope formed by two bracts.
- motivation research — the application of the knowledge and techniques of the social sciences, especially psychology and sociology, to understanding consumer attitudes and behavior: used as a guide in advertising and marketing.
- mouse-ear chickweed — any of various similar and related plants of the genus Cerastium
- moving spirit/force — The moving spirit or moving force behind something is the person or thing that caused it to start and to keep going, or that influenced people to take part in it.
- mucopolysaccharides — Plural form of mucopolysaccharide.
- munchausen syndrome — a factitious disorder in which otherwise healthy individuals seek to hospitalize themselves with feigned or self-induced pathology in order to receive surgical or other medical treatment.
- music to one's ears — something that is very pleasant to hear
- narcotics anonymous — an organization that helps drug users recover from drug addiction
- nasty piece of work — malicious person
- national characters — (character) Characters with accents and other diacritical marks that are used in certain written languages (that are based on the Roman alphabet) but not in others, particularly not in English. A standard list is ISO Latin 1.
- national serviceman — a soldier undertaking compulsory military service
- natural catastrophe — A natural catastrophe is an unexpected event, caused by nature, such as an earthquake or flood, in which there is a lot of suffering, damage, or death.
- neats vs. scruffies — (artificial intelligence, jargon) The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in artificial intelligence research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; "neats" tend to try to build systems that "reason" in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while "scruffies" profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favour looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident and not productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture "common sense" of living intelligences.
- necessary condition — prerequisite
- negative resistance — a characteristic of certain electronic components in which an increase in the applied voltage increases the resistance, producing a proportional decrease in current
- neuropsychodynamics — The theoretical synthesis of neuroscience and psychodynamics.
- nicolaus copernicus — Nicolaus [nik-uh-ley-uh s] /ˌnɪk əˈleɪ əs/ (Show IPA), (Mikolaj Kopernik) 1473–1543, Polish astronomer who promulgated the now accepted theory that the earth and the other planets move around the sun (the Copernican System)
- no strings attached — without conditions
- non causa pro causa — the fallacy of giving as a reason for a conclusion a proposition not actually relevant to that conclusion.
- non-contemporaneous — living or occurring during the same period of time; contemporary.
- north-central state — a state of N Nigeria. Capital: Kaduna. Pop: 4 438 007 (1995 est). Area: 46 053 sq km (17 781 sq miles)
- northern hog sucker — black sucker.
- northwest ordinance — the act of Congress in 1787 providing for the government of the Northwest Territory and setting forth the steps by which its subdivisions might become states.
- noughts and crosses — tick-tack-toe (def 1).
- noughts-and-crosses — tick-tack-toe (def 1).
- nuclear disarmament — the gradual reduction and eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons in the world
- object-oriented sql — (language) (OSQL) A functional language, a superset of SQL, used in Hewlett-Packard's OpenODB database system.
- oceanus procellarum — (Ocean of Storms) the largest dark plain on the face of the moon, in the second and third quadrants: about 2 million square miles (5.2 million sq. km).
- of one's own accord — to be in agreement or harmony; agree.
- oil-catalyst slurry — Oil-catalyst slurry is a heavy aromatic by-product of a refinery's fluid catalytic cracking unit, that forms a small part of global fuel oil supply.
- old church slavonic — the oldest attested Slavic language, an ecclesiastical language written first by Cyril and Methodius in a Bible translation of the 9th century and continued in use for about two centuries. It represents the South Slavic, Bulgarian dialect of 9th-century Salonika with considerable addition of other South and West Slavic elements. Abbreviation: OCS.
- old world scops owl — any of a group of small owls having ear tufts and a whistling call, especially Otus scops (Old World scops owl) and O. sunia (Oriental scops owl)
- ole custom controls — (programming) (OCX) An Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) custom control allowing infinite extension of the Microsoft Access control set. OCX is similar in purpose to VBX used in Visual Basic. Available OCX's include "Scroll Bar Control", "Calendar Control", and "Data Outline Control".
- olive-backed thrush — Swainson's thrush.
- on (or off) course — moving (or not moving) in the intended direction
- on no consideration — for no reason whatsoever; never
- open source license — (legal) Any document that attempts to specify open source usage and distribution of software. These licenses are usually drafted by experts and are likely to be more legally sound than one a programmer could write. However, loopholes do exist. Here is a non-exhaustive list of open source licenses: 1. Public Domain - No license. 2. BSD License - An early open source license 3. General Public License (GPL) - The copyleft license of the Free Software Foundation. Used for GNU software and much of Linux. 4. Artistic License Less restrictive than the GPL, permitted by Perl in addition to the GPL. 5. Mozilla Public Licenses. (MPL, MozPL) and Netscape Public License (NPL).
- open-hearth process — a process of steelmaking in which the charge is laid in a furnace (open-hearth furnace) on a shallow hearth and heated directly by burning gas as well as radiatively by the furnace walls.
- operations director — a director or senior manager who oversees the efficiency of business operations
- operations research — the analysis, usually involving mathematical treatment, of a process, problem, or operation to determine its purpose and effectiveness and to gain maximum efficiency.