20-letter words containing g, o, r
- binge-purge syndrome — bulimia.
- biological diversity — Biological diversity is the same as biodiversity.
- bismarck archipelago — a group of over 200 islands in the SW Pacific, northeast of New Guinea: part of Papua New Guinea. Main islands: New Britain, New Ireland, Lavongai, and the Admiralty Islands. Chief town: Rabaul, on New Britain. Pop: 566 610 (2000). Area: 49 658 sq km (19 173 sq miles)
- blue ridge mountains — a mountain range in the eastern US, extending from West Virginia into Georgia: part of the Appalachian mountains. Highest peak: Mount Mitchell, 2038 m (6684 ft)
- bolometric magnitude — the magnitude of a star derived either from the total energy that it radiates at all wavelengths or from the total energy of those of its wavelengths that are received on earth.
- born-again christian — person: evangelical
- bottom-up processing — a processing technique, either in the brain or in a computer, in which incoming information is analysed in successive steps and later-stage processing does not affect processing in earlier stages
- boulogne billancourt — a suburb of Paris, in N France.
- boulogne-billancourt — an industrial suburb of SW Paris. Pop: 106 367 (1999)
- bowling on the green — lawn bowling.
- bowling-on-the-green — a game played with wooden balls on a level, closely mowed green having a slight bias, the object being to roll one's ball as near as possible to a smaller white ball at the other end of the green. Also called bowls, bowling on the green. Compare bowl2 (def 2), bowling green, jack1 (def 7), rink (def 5).
- boy-meets-girl story — a film, book, etc whose plot is conventionally or trivially romantic
- breakerless ignition — electronic ignition.
- bring down the house — to receive enthusiastic applause from the audience
- bring home the bacon — If you bring home the bacon, you achieve what you needed to achieve.
- bring into the world — (of a midwife, doctor, etc) to deliver (a baby)
- bring the house down — to win great applause
- bring to one's knees — to force to submit or give in
- bring to sb's notice — If you bring something to someone's notice, you make them aware of it.
- bring x to its knees — To present a computer, operating system, piece of software, or algorithm with a load so extreme or pathological that it grinds to a halt. "To bring a MicroVAX to its knees, try twenty users running vi - or four running Emacs." Compare hog.
- broadcasting station — a television or radio station
- brown lung (disease) — a chronic disease of the lungs caused by inhalation of fine textile fibers, esp. cotton; byssinosis
- california gold fern — an evergreen fern, Pityrogramma triangularis, growing from British Columbia to California, having the underside of the leaves covered with a deep yellow, powderlike substance.
- carbohydrate loading — the practice of eating high amounts of carbohydrates, sometimes after a period of low carbohydrate intake, for several days immediately before competing in an athletic event, especially a marathon, in order to store glycogen in the body, thereby providing greater reserves of energy.
- career limiting move — (jargon) (CLM, Sun) Any action endangering one's future prospects of getting plum projects and raises, and possibly one's job. E.g. "His Halloween costume was a parody of his manager. He won the prize for "best CLM"." A severe bug discovered by a customer might be a "CLM bug".
- case based reasoning — (artificial intelligence) (CBR) A technique for problem solving which looks for previous examples which are similar to the current problem. This is useful where heuristic knowledge is not available. There are many situations where experts are not happy to be questioned about their knowledge by people who want to write the knowledge in rules, for use in expert systems. In most of these situations, the natural way for an expert to describe his or her knowledge is through examples, stories or cases (which are all basically the same thing). Such an expert will teach trainees about the expertise by apprenticeship, i.e. by giving examples and by asking the trainees to remember them, copy them and adapt them in solving new problems if they describe situations that are similar to the new problems. CBR aims to exploit such knowledge. Some key research areas are efficient indexing, how to define "similarity" between cases and how to use temporal information.
- cassegrain telescope — an astronomical reflecting telescope in which incident light is reflected from a large concave paraboloid mirror onto a smaller convex hyperboloid mirror and then back through a hole in the concave mirror to form the image
- cerebral haemorrhage — bleeding from an artery in the brain, which in severe cases causes a stroke
- change a reservation — If you change a reservation, you move a booking to a different date because someone who has booked a room has informed you that they wish to stay there on a different date.
- change-speed gearbox — A change-speed gearbox is a set of movable or constant gears which allows the speed ratio between input and output shafts to be changed either manually or automatically.
- child support agency — the British government agency concerned with the welfare of children
- chromaticity diagram — a diagram in which values of two chromaticity coordinates are marked on a pair of rectangular axes, a point in the plane of these axes representing the chromaticity of any colour
- chrono-logical order — the arrangement of things following one after another in time: Put these documents in chronological order.
- coalition government — a government containing members of two or more political parties
- collective agreement — a negotiated agreement, which is not enforceable at law, between an employer and employees' representatives, covering rates of pay or terms and conditions of employment, or both
- college of cardinals — the collective body of cardinals having the function of electing and advising the pope
- commissioning editor — a person who commissions authors to write books and magazine articles
- comparative judgment — any judgment about whether there is a difference between two or more stimuli
- comparative religion — a field of study seeking to derive general principles from a comparison and classification of the growth and influence of various religions.
- compensatory damages — sum paid for a loss
- complementary angles — either of two angles that added together produce an angle of 90°.
- composite photograph — a photograph formed by superimposing two or more separate photographs
- compression ignition — ignition of engine fuel by the heat of air compressed in the cylinders into which the fuel is introduced.
- computer programming — the activity or profession of writing computer programs
- computer typesetting — a system for the high-speed composition of type by a device driven by punched paper tape or magnetic tape that has been processed by a computer
- computing dictionary — Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
- confectioners' sugar — Confectioners' sugar is very fine white sugar that is used for making icing and candy.
- conferencing over ip — (communications, standard) (CoIP) Standards for the transmission of multimedia over the Internet. CoIP extends VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) with text, images, video. The main CoIP standard is based on H.323. The VoIP forum of the IMTC merged with the H.323 Activity Group in January 1999 to form the Conferencing over IP (CoIP) Activity Group. VoIP uses "VoIP Devices" as gateways to route voice data packets over the Internet or PSTN. Protocols such as SGCP and its successor MGCP extend VoIP to handle media other than voice data.
- congressional record — (in the US) the government journal that publishes all proceedings of Congress
- congressman-at-large — (in the US) a member of the House of Representatives who was elected by the voters of an entire state as opposed to the voters of a single Congressional district