21-letter words containing n, a, s
- biobehavioral science — any of the various branches of the life sciences, as neurobiology, neurochemistry, or neuroendocrinology, that deal with biological aspects of behavior.
- 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.
- blow one's brains out — to kill oneself by shooting oneself in the head
- brainstorming session — a meeting held for the purpose of intensive discussion to solve problems or generate ideas
- break someone's heart — an act or instance of breaking; disruption or separation of parts; fracture; rupture: There was a break in the window.
- british anti-lewisite — a colorless, oily, viscous liquid, C 3 H 8 OS 2 , originally developed as an antidote to lewisite and now used in treating bismuth, gold, mercury, and arsenic poisoning.
- british north america — (formerly) Canada or its constituent regions or provinces that formed part of the British Empire
- 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
- bulletin board system — (communications, application) (BBS, bboard /bee'bord/, message board, forum; plural: BBSes) A computer and associated software which typically provides an electronic message database where people can log in and leave messages. Messages are typically split into topic groups similar to the newsgroups on Usenet (which is like a distributed BBS). Any user may submit or read any message in these public areas. The term comes from physical pieces of board on which people can pin messages written on paper for general consumption - a "physical bulletin board". Ward Christensen, the programmer and operator of the first BBS (on-line 1978-02-16) called it a CBBS for "computer bulletin board system". Since the rise of the World-Wide Web, the term has become antiquated, though the concept is more popular than ever, with many websites featuring discussion areas where users can post messages for public consumption. Apart from public message areas, some BBSes provided archives of files, personal electronic mail and other services of interest to the system operator (sysop). Thousands of BBSes around the world were run from amateurs' homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Although BBSes were traditionally the domain of hobbyists, many connected directly to the Internet (accessed via telnet), others were operated by government, educational, and research institutions. Fans of Usenet or the big commercial time-sharing bboards such as CompuServe, CIX and GEnie tended to consider local BBSes the low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they helped connect hackers and users in the personal-micro and let them exchange code. Use of this term for a Usenet newsgroup generally marks one either as a newbie fresh in from the BBS world or as a real old-timer predating Usenet.
- 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.
- by fair means or foul — If someone tries to achieve something by fair means or foul, they use every means possible in order to achieve it, and they do not care if their behaviour is dishonest or unfair.
- by no manner of means — definitely not
- canticle of canticles — another name for the Song of Solomon, used in the Douay Bible
- caroline of brunswick — 1768–1821, wife of George IV of the United Kingdom: tried for adultery (1820)
- cartesian coordinates — a system of representing points in space in terms of their distance from a given origin measured along a set of mutually perpendicular axes. Written (x,y,z) with reference to three axes
- 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
- casing collar locator — A casing collar locator is a tool that is placed down the borehole to allow depths to be measured by detecting the position of the casing collar.
- castellon de la plana — a port in E Spain. Pop: 160 714 (2003 est)
- 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.
- 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.
- central standard time — one of the standard times used in North America, based on the local time of the 90° meridian, six hours behind Greenwich Mean Time
- charity commissioners — (in Britain) members of a commission constituted to keep a register of charities and control charitable trusts
- cheese and wine party — a party at which cheese and wine are served
- 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.
- chief master sergeant — a solider of the highest enlisted rank in the US Air Force
- 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
- 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.
- clayton antitrust act — an act of Congress in 1914 supplementing the Sherman Antitrust Act and establishing the FTC.
- clean someone's clock — an instrument for measuring and recording time, especially by mechanical means, usually with hands or changing numbers to indicate the hour and minute: not designed to be worn or carried about.
- clinical psychologist — a practitioner of clinical psychology
- closed-angle glaucoma — angle-closure glaucoma. See under glaucoma.
- collins street farmer — a businessman who invests in farms, land, etc
- column address strobe — (hardware) (CAS) A signal sent from a processor (or memory controller) to a dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) (qv) circuit to indicate that the column address lines are valid.
- comfortably-furnished — containing comfortable furniture
- commercial television — television companies which make money by selling advertising
- commercial translator — (language) An English-like pre-COBOL language for business data processing.
- committal proceedings — a preliminary hearing in a magistrates' court to decide if there is a case to answer
- committing magistrate — a magistrate who decides if there is enough evidence for a case to proceed
- communication science — the study of ways in which human beings communicate, including speech, gesture, telecommunication systems, publishing and broadcasting media, etc
- communications server — (operating system) IBM's rebranding of ACF.
- community association — (in Britain) an organization of people and groups working for the common good of a neighbourhood, usually operating under a written constitution registered with the Charity Commissioners
- comparative statement — a financial statement with figures arranged in two or more parallel columns, each column representing a fiscal year or other period, used to compare performance between periods.
- comparison microscope — a microscope having two objective lenses and using a system of prisms to form in one eyepiece adjacent images of two different objects.