18-letter words containing n, a, u, s, e
- counterculturalist — the culture and lifestyle of those people, especially among the young, who reject or oppose the dominant values and behavior of society.
- countryside agency — (in England) a government agency that promotes the conservation and enjoyment of the countryside and aims to stimulate employment in rural areas
- creeping featurism — (jargon) /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ (Or "feature creep") A systematic tendency to load more chrome and features onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed. "The main problem with BSD Unix has always been creeping featurism." More generally, creeping featurism is the tendency for anything to become more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had this feature too". The result is usually a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone, and then another, and another, .... When creeping featurism gets out of hand, it's like a cancer. Usually this term is used to describe computer programs, but it could also be said of the federal government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A similar phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious redesigns; see second-system effect. See also creeping elegance.
- cultural awareness — Someone's cultural awareness is their understanding of the differences between themselves and people from other countries or other backgrounds, especially differences in attitudes and values.
- cultural universal — a cultural pattern extant in every known society.
- cumulative scoring — a method of scoring in which the score of a partnership is taken as the sum of their scores on all hands played.
- custodial sentence — a sentence given by a court that involves a term of imprisonment
- customer relations — Customer relations are the relationships that a business has with its customers and the way in which it treats them.
- customs and excise — Customs and Excise is a British government department which is responsible for collecting taxes on imported and exported goods. Compare Customs Service.
- cut-and-waste code — (humour, programming) Code that someone found online (e.g. in a blog) and copied and pasted into a product. The result is usually a lot of wasted time trying to track down obscure bugs from code that may have made sense in the original context but not in the new one. Also known as blog-driven development.
- dangerous offender — an offender who is deemed by a court of law to be likely to engage in further violent conduct, and who thus becomes eligible for an indefinite prison sentence
- defense calculator — IBM 701
- deinstitutionalize — to discharge (a patient) as from a mental institution
- delmarva peninsula — a peninsula of the northeast US, between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic
- destruct mechanism — a mechanism that causes the destruction of a rocket or missile when activated
- devil's paintbrush — a perennial European hawkweed (Hieracium aurantiacum) with leafless flower stalks bearing a cluster of orange-red heads: now a common weed in N U.S. and Canada
- diabetes insipidus — a disorder of the pituitary gland causing excessive thirst and excretion of large quantities of dilute urine
- diaminofluorescein — (organic compound) A fluorescein into which two amino groups have been substituted.
- dietary supplement — a substance taken in addition to what you eat in order to promote health
- digital humanities — (used with a singular verb) the study of literature, philosophy, etc., as facilitated by computer technology or digital media: Digital humanities uses data analysis to find patterns in large bodies of text. the set of methodologies used in such scholarship.
- digital signatures — digital signature
- discourse analysis — the study of the rules or patterns characterizing units of connected speech or writing longer than a sentence.
- dispatch documents — documents sent with a parcel, etc, detailing information such as contents, delivery address, etc
- distance education — education in which students receive instruction over the Internet, from a video, etc., instead of going to school.
- drainpipe trousers — trousers with very narrow legs
- driver's education — high-school driving classes
- dwarf storage unit — (humour) (DSU) An IBM term for a cupboard.
- dysfunctionalities — Plural form of dysfunctionality.
- east indian walnut — lebbek.
- eastern algonquian — a subgroup of the Algonquian language family, comprising the languages spoken aboriginally from Nova Scotia to northeastern North Carolina.
- electrostatic unit — any unit that belongs to a system of electrical cgs units in which the electric constant is given the value of unity and is taken as a pure number
- elementary student — primary school pupil
- engelbart, douglas — Douglas Engelbart
- entrepreneurialism — The spirit or state of acting in an entrepreneurial manner.
- epstein-barr virus — a virus belonging to the herpes family that causes infectious mononucleosis; it is also implicated in the development of Burkitt's lymphoma and Hodgkin's disease
- equinoctial spring — either of the two highest spring tides that occur at the equinoxes
- ethnomusicological — Relating to or pertaining to ethnomusicology.
- evolution strategy — (ES) A kind of evolutionary algorithm where individuals (potential solutions) are encoded by a set of real-valued "object variables" (the individual's "genome"). For each object variable an individual also has a "strategy variable" which determines the degree of mutation to be applied to the corresponding object variable. The strategy variables also mutate, allowing the rate of mutation of the object variables to vary. An ES is characterised by the population size, the number of offspring produced in each generation and whether the new population is selected from parents and offspring or only from the offspring. ES were invented in 1963 by Ingo Rechenberg, Hans-Paul Schwefel at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) while searching for the optimal shapes of bodies in a flow.
- exhaustive testing — (programming) Executing a program with all possible combinations of inputs or values for program variables.
- extemporaneousness — The degree or property of being extemporaneous.
- eyewitness account — a description given by someone who was present at an event
- federal funds rate — The federal funds rate is the overnight rate between banks.
- feeping creaturism — /fee'ping kree"ch*r-izm/ A deliberate spoonerism for creeping featurism, meant to imply that the system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of hacks. This term isn"t really well defined, but it sounds so neat that most hackers have said or heard it. It is probably reinforced by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their customary noises.
- fibonacci sequence — (mathematics) The infinite sequence of numbers beginning 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... in which each term is the sum of the two terms preceding it. The ratio of successive Fibonacci terms tends to the golden ratio, namely (1 + sqrt 5)/2.
- fissure of rolando — central sulcus.
- flash butt welding — a method of welding metal edge-to-edge with a powerful electric flash followed by the application of pressure.
- fracture toughness — The fracture toughness of a material is how likely it is to resist fracture.
- fu manchu mustache — a mustache whose ends droop to the chin.
- fuel-saving device — a device that increases the fuel efficiency of a vehicle, so that it uses less fuel for a further distance
- functional disease — a disease in which there is an abnormal change in the function of an organ, but no structural alteration in the tissues involved (opposed to organic disease).