21-letter words containing h
- british sign language — the main sign language used by deaf people in the United Kingdom
- british standard time — the standard time used in Britain all the year round from 1968 to 1971, set one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time and equalling Central European Time
- 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.
- burn the midnight oil — to work or study late into the night
- burroughs corporation — (company) A company which merged with Sperry Univac to form Unisys Corporation. They produced the Datatron 200 series among other computers.
- bursting at the seams — If a place is very full, you can say that it is bursting at the seams.
- businessman's holiday — busman's holiday.
- carrie chapman l catt — Carrie Chapman Lane, 1859–1947, U.S. leader in women's suffrage movements.
- cascading style sheet — a file recording style details, such as fonts, colours, etc, that is read by browsers so that style is consistent over multiple web pages
- 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
- cause-effect graphing — (programming) A testing technique that aids in selecting, in a systematic way, a high-yield set of test cases that logically relates causes to effects to produce test cases. It has a beneficial side effect in pointing out incompleteness and ambiguities in specifications.
- caviar to the general — a thing appealing only to a highly cultivated taste: Hamlet II, ii
- central daylight time — the time observed in the Central Time Zone of the United states when Daylight Savings Time is in effect; GMT -5
- 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.
- charge-coupled device — an electronic device, used in imaging and signal processing, in which information is represented as packets of electric charge that are stored in an array of tiny closely spaced capacitors and can be moved from one capacitor to another in a controlled way
- charity commissioners — (in Britain) members of a commission constituted to keep a register of charities and control charitable trusts
- charles edward stuart — a member of the royal family that ruled in Scotland from 1371 to 1714 and in England from 1603 to 1714.
- charterhouse of parma — a novel (1839) by Stendhal.
- cheese and wine party — a party at which cheese and wine are served
- cheque guarantee card — a card issued by a bank or building society, guaranteeing payment of a customer's cheques up to a stated value
- chequebook journalism — Chequebook journalism is the practice of paying people large sums of money for information about crimes or famous people in order to get material for newspaper articles.
- chickweed wintergreen — a primulaceous plant, Trientalis europaea, of N Europe and N Asia, having white flowers and leaves arranged in a whorl
- chief master sergeant — a solider of the highest enlisted rank in the US Air Force
- chief warrant officer — a senior-ranking warrant officer in various armed forces
- child-directed speech — baby talk (def 2).
- chinese forget-me-not — an eastern Asian plant, Cynoglossum amabile, of the borage family, having lance-shaped leaves and clustered, showy, blue, pink, or white flowers.
- chinese lantern plant — winter cherry (def 1).
- 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
- chinese-lantern plant — a perennial ground-cherry (Physalis alkekengi) grown for winter bouquets because of the bladderlike red calyx that surrounds its small, tomatolike fruit
- chink in one's armour — a small but fatal weakness
- chloroformyl chloride — phosgene.
- chocolate chip cookie — a biscuit containing chips of chocolate
- choledochojejunostomy — (medicine) The surgical formation of an opening between the common bile duct and the jejunum.
- christmas decorations — decorations of different kinds appropriate to Christmas, such as tinsel, candles, images of angels, etc.
- christmas tree packet — (networking) (Or kamikaze packet) A packet with every single option set for whatever protocol is in use. The term doubtless derives from a fanciful image of each little option bit being represented by a different-coloured light bulb, all turned on. 10 points for correctly being able to process a "Kamikaze" packet (AKA nastygram, Christmas tree packet, lamp test segment, et al.). That is, correctly handle a segment with the maximum combination of features at once (e.g. a SYN URG PUSH FIN segment with options and data). Compare: Chernobyl packet.
- church-rosser theorem — (theory) A property of a reduction system that states that if an expression can be reduced by zero or more reduction steps to either expression M or expression N then there exists some other expression to which both M and N can be reduced. This implies that there is a unique normal form for any expression since M and N cannot be different normal forms because the theorem says they can be reduced to some other expression and normal forms are irreducible by definition. It does not imply that a normal form is reachable, only that if reduction terminates it will reach a unique normal form.
- civil rights movement — campaign for human freedoms
- 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.
- clerk to the justices — (in England) a legally qualified person who sits in court with lay justices to advise them on points of law
- clinical psychologist — a practitioner of clinical psychology
- clone-and-hack coding — case and paste
- 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.