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21-letter words containing h, o, t, a

  • bibliographic utility — an organization that maintains computerized bibliographic records and offers to its members or customers various products and services related to these records.
  • biological psychiatry — a school of psychiatric thought concerned with the medical treatment of mental disorders, especially through medication, and emphasizing the relationship between behavior and brain function and the search for physical causes of mental illness.
  • 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.
  • bluethroat pikeblenny — See under pikeblenny.
  • bottlebrush moustache — a short, bristly moustache
  • bow to the inevitable — If someone bows to the inevitable and does something that they do not want to do, they do it, because circumstances force them to do it.
  • break someone's heart — an act or instance of breaking; disruption or separation of parts; fracture; rupture: There was a break in the window.
  • break the fourth wall — (esp of a character in a television programme, film, or play) to refer to, acknowledge, or address the audience, usually for comedic effect or as an avante-garde technique
  • breakthrough bleeding — bleeding from the uterus that occurs between menstrual periods
  • 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
  • broadleaved whitebeam — a whitebeam, Sorbus latifolia, widely found in France and England, also planted as an ornamental
  • 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.
  • burroughs corporation — (company)   A company which merged with Sperry Univac to form Unisys Corporation. They produced the Datatron 200 series among other computers.
  • cat on a hot tin roof — a play (1955) by Tennessee Williams.
  • 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 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • chief warrant officer — a senior-ranking warrant officer in various armed forces
  • 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
  • chocolate chip cookie — a biscuit containing chips of chocolate
  • christmas decorations — decorations of different kinds appropriate to Christmas, such as tinsel, candles, images of angels, etc.
  • 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.
  • clinical psychologist — a practitioner of clinical psychology
  • column chromatography — the separation of mixtures into their constituents by preferential adsorption by a solid, as a column of silica (column chromatography) or a strip of filter paper (paper chromatography) or by a gel.
  • comfortably-furnished — containing comfortable furniture
  • comparative philology — comparative linguistics.
  • completing the square — a method, usually of solving quadratic equations, by which a quadratic expression, as x 2 − 4 x + 3, is written as the sum or difference of a perfect square and a constant, x 2 − 4 x + 4 + 3 − 4 = (x − 2) 2 − 1, by addition and subtraction of appropriate constant terms.
  • computer architecture — the structure, behaviour, and design of computers
  • conditional discharge — If someone who is convicted of an offence is given a conditional discharge by a court, they are not punished unless they later commit a further offence.
  • congregational church — any evangelical Protestant Christian Church that is governed according to the principles of Congregationalism. In 1972 the majority of churches in the Congregational Church in England and Wales voted to become part of the United Reformed Church
  • constant mesh gearbox — A constant mesh gearbox is a type of transmission in which all forward gear pairs remain engaged.
  • constantine the great — (Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus"the Great") a.d. 288?–337, Roman emperor 324–337: named Constantinople as the new capital; legally sanctioned Christian worship.
  • consummatory behavior — a behavior pattern that occurs in response to a stimulus and that achieves the satisfaction of a specific drive, as the eating of captured prey by a hungry predator (distinguished from appetitive behavior).
  • corporate hospitality — Corporate hospitality is the entertainment that a company offers to its most valued clients, for example by inviting them to sporting events and providing them with food and drink.
  • cosmological redshift — the part of the redshift of celestial objects resulting from the expansion of the universe.
  • cottony-cushion scale — a small scale insect, Icerya purchasi, that is a pest of citrus trees in California: it is controlled by introducing an Australian ladybird, Rodolia cardinalis, into affected areas
  • crude oil dehydration — Crude oil dehydration is the removal of water or water vapor from crude oil, by separating the oil from the water, often in a rotating centrifuge.
  • crystallographic axis — one of the imaginary reference lines passing through the center of an ideal crystal, designated a, b, or c.
  • cultural anthropology — the branch of anthropology dealing with cultural as opposed to biological and racial features
  • dacryocystorhinostomy — A surgical procedure to restore the flow of tears into the nose from the lacrimal sac when the nasolacrimal duct does not function.
  • dance to another tune — to alter one's actions or opinions as a result of changed conditions
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