16-letter words containing c, u, t, a
- victorian values — qualities considered to characterize the Victorian period, including enterprise and initiative and the importance of the family
- virtual particle — an elementary particle of transitory existence that does not appear as a free particle in a particular situation but that can transmit a force from one particle to another.
- visual interface — (tool, text) (vi) /V-I/, /vi:/, *never* /siks/ A screen editor crufted together by Bill Joy for an early BSD release. vi became the de facto standard Unix editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favourite outside of MIT until the rise of Emacs after about 1984. It tends to frustrate new users no end, as it will neither take commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, and the default setup provides no indication of which mode the editor is in (one correspondent accordingly reports that he has often heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/). Nevertheless it is still widely used (about half the respondents in a 1991 Usenet poll preferred it), and even some Emacs fans resort to it as a mail editor and for small editing jobs (mainly because it starts up faster than the bulkier versions of Emacs). See holy wars.
- vitruvian scroll — a scroll forming a stylized wave pattern.
- vocabulary entry — (in dictionaries) a word, phrase, abbreviation, symbol, affix, name, etc., listed with its definition or explanation in alphabetical order or listed for identification after the word from which it is derived or to which it is related.
- voluntary muscle — muscle whose action is normally controlled by an individual's will; mainly skeletal muscle, composed of parallel bundles of striated, multinucleate fibers.
- voluntary school — a school that promotes specific religious beliefs and which is funded by a local education authority but was not established by the authority
- voluntary sector — the part of the economy that consists of non-profit-making organizations, as opposed to the public and private sectors
- walrus moustache — a long thick moustache drooping at the ends
- water chinquapin — an American lotus, Nelumbo lutea, having pale-yellow flowers and an edible seed.
- well-articulated — made clear or distinct: articulated sounds.
- woodland culture — a long pre-Columbian tradition characterized by the corded pottery of a hunting and later agricultural people of the eastern U.S. noted for the construction of burial mounds and other structures and dating from c1000 b.c. to a.d. 1700.