25-letter words containing i, n, r, e
- better the devil you know — If you say better the devil you know or better the devil you know than the devil you don't know, you mean that you would prefer to have contact with or do business with a person you already know, even though you don't like them, than with a person you don't know.
- black-crowned night heron — any of several thick-billed, crepuscular or nocturnal herons of the genus Nycticorax and related genera, as N. nycticorax (black-crowned night heron) of the Old and New Worlds, and Nyctanassa violacea (yellow-crowned night heron) of America.
- blow someone's brains out — To blow someone's brains out means to shoot them in the head, killing them.
- bring pressure to bear on — If you bring pressure or influence to bear on someone, you use it to try and persuade them to do something.
- brute force and ignorance — (jargon) (BFI) A popular design technique at many software houses - brute force coding unrelieved by any knowledge of how problems have been previously solved in elegant ways. Dogmatic adherence to design methods tends to encourage this sort of thing. Characteristic of early larval stage programming; unfortunately, many never outgrow it. Also encountered in the variants BFMI - brute force and massive ignorance, and BFBI - brute force and bloody ignorance. "Gak, they used a bubble sort! That's strictly BFI." Compare bogosity.
- burn (or hang) in effigy — to burn (or hang) an image of (a person) in public, as a way of protesting, as against that person's policies
- by the skin of your teeth — If you do something by the skin of your teeth, you just manage to do it.
- caltech intermediate form — (language) (CIF) A geometry language for VLSI design, in which the primitives are coloured rectangles.
- care of sb, in care of sb — If someone sends you a letter or parcel care of a particular person or place, they send it to that person or place, and it is then passed on to you. In American English, you can also say in care of.
- case integration services — (standard, programming) (CIS) A committee formed to discuss CASE tool integration standards related to ATIS.
- cauchy-schwarz inequality — Schwarz inequality (def 2).
- certificate of enrollment — a document issued to a U.S. vessel of 20 tons gross or more, engaged in fishing or in trade along the U.S. coast, on the Great Lakes, or on U.S. inland waters.
- certificate of unruliness — (in Britain) the decision of a juvenile court that a young person on remand is too unmanageable for local-authority care and should be taken into custody
- character encoding scheme — character encoding
- characteristic polynomial — an expression obtained from a given matrix by taking the determinant of the difference between the matrix and an arbitrary variable times the identity matrix.
- cheshire west and chester — a unitary authority in NW England. Administrative centre: Chester. Pop: 328 100 (2008 est). Area: 917 sq km (354 sq miles)
- cheyne-stokes respiration — respiration characterized by cycles of deep, rapid breathing and weak, slow breathing, as in cases of heart failure or coma
- chief information officer — (job) (CIO) The person who determines the overall strategic direction and business contribution of the information systems function in a business.
- chief of naval operations — the highest officer in the U.S. Navy and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
- child protection register — (in Britain) a confidential list of children who are at continuing risk of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse or neglect
- child-resistant container — A child-resistant container is a container designed to be difficult for a child to open.
- circle of least confusion — the smallest cross section in a beam of paraxial rays, lying in the plane of least spherical aberration.
- client to client protocol — (networking) (CTCP) A type of protocol created to allow structured data such as font information to be exchanged between users on IRC. It is also used to send a query to a user. The available CTCP commands include VERSION, FINGER, DCC CHAT, DCC SEND, TIME, PING, ECHO, CLIENTINFO. Some commands are not available on some IRC client software.
- closed-circuit television — a television system in which signals are transmitted from a television camera to the receivers by cables or telephone links forming a closed circuit, as used in security systems, etc
- commissioner of education — (in the US) the head of a state's education department
- common object file format — (file format) (COFF) The executable file and object file format used by Unix System V Release 3 and later.
- commonwealth of australia — Australia's official title
- communication engineering — the branch of engineering that deals with telecommunications and computer programming and networking.
- community support officer — a uniformed officer who is not a member of the police force but who has certain powers to be exercised in supplementing the role of the police, esp crowd control, tackling anti-social behaviour, etc
- compensated semiconductor — a semiconductor in which donors and acceptors are related in such a way that their opposing electrical effects are partially cancelled
- complementarity principle — the principle that experiments on physical systems of atomic size or smaller, as electrons or photons, can exhibit either particle or wave behavior but not both simultaneously.
- complete inference system — (logic) An inference system A is complete with respect to another system B if A can reach every conclusion which is true in B. The dual to completeness is soundness.
- complete partial ordering — (theory) (cpo) A partial ordering of a set under a relation, where all directed subsets have a least upper bound. A cpo is usually defined to include a least element, bottom (David Schmidt calls this a pointed cpo). A cpo which is algebraic and boundedly complete is a (Scott) domain.
- computer-aided publishing — desktop publishing. Abbreviation: CAP.
- conductiometric titration — a titration technique in which the end-point is determined by measuring the conductance of the solution
- constant angular velocity — (storage) (CAV) One of the two schemes for controlling the rate of rotation of the disk in a disk drive. Constant angular velocity keeps the rate of rotation constant. This means that the linear velocity of the disk under the head is larger when reading or writing the outer tracks. This in turn implies either a variation in the data rate to and from the heads or the bits per unit length along the track. The alternative, constant linear velocity, requires the rate of rotation of the disk to accelerate and decelerate according to the radial postion of the heads, increasing the energy use and vibration.
- constant applicative form — (functional programming) (CAF) A supercombinator which is not a lambda abstraction. This includes truly constant expressions such as 12, (+ 1 2), [1, 2, 3] as well as partially applied functions such as (+ 4). Note that this last example is equivalent under eta abstraction to \ x . + 4 x which is not a CAF. Since a CAF is a supercombinator, it contains no free variables. Moreover, since it is not a lambda abstraction it contains no variables at all. It may however contain identifiers which refer to other CAFs, e.g. c 3 where c = (* 2). A CAF can always be lifted to the top level of the program. It can either be compiled to a piece of graph which will be shared by all uses or to some shared code which will overwrite itself with some graph the first time it is evaluated. A CAF such as ints = from 1 where from n = n : from (n+1) can grow without bound but may only be accessible from within the code of one or more functions. In order for the garbage collector to be able to reclaim such structures, we associate with each function a list of the CAFs to which it refers. When garbage collecting a reference to the function we collect the CAFs on its list.
- constructive interference — the interference of two or more waves of equal frequency and phase, resulting in their mutual reinforcement and producing a single amplitude equal to the sum of the amplitudes of the individual waves.
- copenhagen interpretation — an interpretation of quantum mechanics developed by Niels Bohr and his colleagues at the University of Copenhagen, based on the concept of wave–particle duality and the idea that the observation influences the result of an experiment
- court of general sessions — a local court with general jurisdiction, both civil and criminal.
- crater lake national park — a national park in SW Oregon, in the Cascade Range: Crater Lake. 250 sq. mi. (648 sq. km).
- crown prosecution service — (in England and Wales) an independent prosecuting body, established in 1986, that decides whether cases brought by the police should go to the courts: headed by the Director of Public Prosecutions
- crude oil degassing plant — A crude oil degassing plant is equipment that removes light ends such as methane and butane from crude oil.
- crude oil pyrolysis plant — A crude oil pyrolysis plant is equipment used for converting waste and poor fuel to a better product by pyrolysis (= the use of heat to decompose organic material).
- crude oil splitting tower — A crude oil splitting tower is a vessel into which crude oil enters, at the bottom, and where the different components are obtained by a splitting process, rather than rearranging the molecules.
- culture specific syndrome — a behavioral disturbance in a specific cultural setting that is identified and named by the cultural group itself.
- cut a person down to size — to reduce in importance or decrease the conceit of
- data encryption algorithm — (DEA) An ANSI standard defined in ANSI X3.92-1981. It is identical to the Data Encryption Standard (DES).
- data processing equipment — Data processing equipment is electrically operated equipment that accumulates, processes, and stores data.
- dataphone digital service — (communications, product) (DDS) The first private-line digital service offered by AT&T, with data rates typically at 2.4, 4.8, 9.6 and 56 kilobits per second. DDS is now part of AT&T's Accunet family of services. Most LEC (local exchange carriers) and IXC (IntereXchange Carriers) offer similar services.