24-letter words containing n, e, s
- black-english-vernacular — Also called African American Vernacular English, African American English, Afro-American English, Black English Vernacular, Black Vernacular English.a dialect of American English characterized by pronunciations, syntactic structures, and vocabulary associated with and used by some North American black people and exhibiting a wide variety and range of forms varying in the extent to which they differ from standard English.
- blot on one's escutcheon — a stain on one's honour
- bose-einstein condensate — a phase of matter in which all bosons in a given physical system have been cooled to a temperature near absolute zero and enter the same quantum state.
- bose-einstein statistics — the branch of quantum statistics applied to systems of particles of zero or integral spin that do not obey the exclusion principle
- bread-and-butter pickles — a sweet pickle relish made of sliced cucumbers, onions, and, often, bell peppers with mustard seed, turmeric, etc.
- bretton woods conference — an international monetary conference held in 1944 at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, which resulted in the establishment of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
- bring out of one's shell — to help to become less shy and reserved
- bring someone to justice — If a criminal is brought to justice, he or she is punished for a crime by being arrested and tried in a court of law.
- british technology group — an organization formed in 1981 by the merger of the National Enterprise Board and the National Research and Development Corporation to encourage and finance technological innovation: privatized in 2000
- broadleaved spindle tree — a flowering tree, Euonymus Latifolius, native to some parts of Western Europe and widely planted as an ornamental
- bull information systems — (company) A multinational I.T. group based in Europe with 21,000 people and operations in more than 85 countries. In 1997, Bull earned revenues of over $4 billion, including over 65% outside of France, its country of origin. The company is ranked as the third largest systems integrator in Europe.
- bureau of indian affairs — the US federal government agency responsible for managing 66 million acres of land held in trust for Native Americans as well as for administering their trust assets
- business systems analyst — (job) A person who works directly with management and users to analyse, specify, and design business applications. The Business Systems Analyst develops detailed functional, system, and program specifications using structured design methodologies and CASE tools. He must have strong business sense and communications skills. He works with both the information systems team and the strategic planning business group.
- but that's another story — You say 'but that's another story' when you have mentioned a subject that you are not going to talk about or explain in detail.
- butylated hydroxyanisole — Chemistry, Pharmacology. BHA.
- by common/mutual consent — If something happens by common consent or by mutual consent, it happens as the result of an agreement between the people or groups involved.
- caeremoniale episcoporum — the liturgical book, used by bishops, containing regulations and prescriptions that are authoritative in matters not covered in the missal or other service books.
- californian spangled cat — a breed of short-haired cat with a spotted coat, bred in California to resemble a leopard in appearance
- canonical encoding rules — (protocol, standard) (CER) A restricted variant of BER for producing unequivocal transfer syntax for data structures described by ASN.1. Whereas BER gives choices as to how data values may be encoded, CER and DER select just one encoding from those allowed by the basic encoding rules, eliminating all of the options. They are useful when the encodings must be preserved, e.g. in security exchanges. CER and DER differ in the set of restrictions that they place on the encoder. The basic difference between CER and DER is that DER uses definitive length form and CER uses indefinite length form. Documents: ITU-T X.690, ISO 8825-1. See also PER.
- carry coals to newcastle — 1st Duke of, Pelham-Holles, Thomas.
- cast pearls before swine — to present something of great interest or value to someone incapable of appreciating it
- cellular multiprocessing — (architecture, parallel) (CMP) The partitioning of processors into separate computing environments running different operating systems. The term cellular multiprocessing appears to have been coined by Unisys, who are developing a system where computers communicate as clustered machines through a high speed bus, rather than through communication protocols such as TCP/IP. The Unisys system is based on Intel processors, initially the Pentium II Xeon and moving on to the 64-bit Merced processors later in 1999. It will be scalable from four up to 32 processors, which can be clustered or partitioned in various ways. For example a sixteen processor system could be configured as four Windows NT systems (each functioning as a four-processor symmetric multiprocessing system), or an 8-way NT and 8-way Unix system. Supported operating systems will be Windows NT, SCO's Unixware 7.0, Unisys' SVR4 Unix and possibly the OS2200 and MCP-AS mainframe operating systems (with the assistance of Unisys' own dedicated chipset).
- cerebrospinal meningitis — an acute infectious form of meningitis caused by the bacterium Neisseria meningitidis, characterized by high fever, skin rash, delirium, stupor, and sometimes coma
- cerebrovascular accident — a sudden interruption of the blood supply to the brain caused by rupture of an artery in the brain (cerebral haemorrhage) or the blocking of a blood vessel, as by a clot of blood (cerebral occlusion)
- chain and sprocket drive — A chain and sprocket drive is a type of power transmission in which a roller chain engages with two or more toothed wheels or sprockets, used in engines as a drive from crankshaft to camshaft.
- character set identifier — (character) (CSID) (IBM) A number that identifies a character set.
- chromaticity coordinates — three numbers used to specify a colour, each of which is equal to one of the three tristimulus values divided by their sum
- chronic fatigue syndrome — Chronic fatigue syndrome is an illness that is thought to be caused by a virus, and which affects people for a long period of time. Its symptoms include tiredness and aching muscles. The abbreviation CFS is often used.
- civil service commission — an official body which regulates the wages and working conditions of civil servants and promotes their work
- coal-fired power station — a power station that generates electricity by the burning of coal
- coefficient of expansion — the amount of expansion (or contraction) per unit length of a material resulting from one degree change in temperature
- coefficient of viscosity — the measure of the viscosity of a fluid, equal to the force per unit area required to maintain a difference of velocity of one unit distance per unit time between two parallel planes in the fluid that lie in the direction of flow and are separated by one unit distance: usually expressed in poise or centipoise.
- colony collapse disorder — a pathological condition affecting a large number of honeybee colonies, in which various stresses may lead to the abrupt disappearance of worker bees from the hive, leaving only the queen and newly hatched bees behind and thus causing the colony to stop functioning. Abbreviation: CCD.
- come/go to someone's aid — If you come or go to someone's aid, you try to help them when they are in danger or difficulty.
- communications satellite — an artificial satellite used to relay radio, television, and telephone signals around the earth, usually in geostationary orbit
- compact disc interactive — (storage) (CD-i) An embedded application of CD-ROM allowing the user limited interaction with films, games and educational applications via a special controller.
- compact fluorescent lamp — A compact fluorescent lamp is a small fluorescent lamp (= a tubular light bulb coated with phosphor which produces a bright light) that has a lamp life that is much longer than incandescent lamps.
- compensatory lengthening — the lengthening of a vowel when a following consonant is weakened or lost, as the change from Old English niht [nikht] /nɪxt/ (Show IPA) to night [nahyt] /naɪt/ (Show IPA) with loss of [kh] /x/ (Show IPA) and lengthening of [i] /ɪ/ (Show IPA) to a vowel that eventually became [ahy] /aɪ/ (Show IPA).
- complement fixation test — a serological test for detecting the presence of a specific antibody or antigen, used in the diagnosis of syphilis, etc
- complement-fixation test — a test for diagnosing an infectious disease by detecting the presence of antibody in the blood, based on the fixing of a known quantity of complement to the antigen being tested and the specific antibody that combines with it. Abbreviation: CFT.
- computer design language — (language) An ALGOL-like language for computer design.
- condensed matter physics — the branch of physics that deals with the macroscopic physical properties of matter, especially solids; the study of the electromagnetic, structural, and thermodynamic properties of solids.
- condensed-matter physics — the branch of physics that deals with the macroscopic physical properties of matter, especially solids; the study of the electromagnetic, structural, and thermodynamic properties of solids.
- congestive heart failure — heart failure characterized by weakness, breathlessness, and abnormal congestion in the circulatory system, esp. in the lungs or lower legs
- conservation of momentum — the principle that the total linear or angular momentum in any isolated system is constant, provided that no external force is applied
- consonantal alliteration — the use of the same consonant at the beginning of each word or each stressed syllable in a line of verse, as in around the rock the ragged rascal ran
- constant linear velocity — (storage) (CLV) A way of controlling the rotation of the disks in a disk drive in which the linear velocity of the disk surface relative to the read/write heads is kept constant. In order to achieve constant linear velocity, the disk must rotate faster (at a higher angular velocity) when reading or writing tracks closer to the centre. Having a constant linear read/write speed along the track means that the electrical signal to and from the heads has a constant data rate (bits per second), thus simplifying the timing of the drive electronics somewhat. However, rotating at less than the maximum possible rate sacrifices some potential performance compared to the alternative, constant angular velocity. Also, varying the rate causes more vibration and consumes more energy.
- constantinopolitan creed — a formal statement of the chief tenets of Christian belief, adopted by the first Nicene Council.
- consultant paediatrician — a paediatrician who has attained the rank of consultant
- cooperative multitasking — (parallel, operating system) A form of multitasking where it is the responsibility of the currently running task to give up the processor to allow other tasks to run. This contrasts with pre-emptive multitasking where the task scheduler periodically suspends the running task and restarts another. Cooperative multitasking requires the programmer to place calls at suitable points in his code to allow his task to be descheduled which is not always easy if there is no obvious top-level main loop or some routines run for a long time. If a task does not allow itself to be descheduled all other tasks on the system will appear to "freeze" and will not respond to user action. The advantage of cooperative multitasking is that the programmer knows where the program will be descheduled and can make sure that this will not cause unwanted interaction with other processes. Under pre-emptive multitasking, the scheduler must ensure that sufficient state for each process is saved and restored that they will not interfere. Thus cooperative multitasking can have lower overheads than pre-emptive multitasking because of the greater control it offers over when a task may be descheduled. Cooperative multitasking is used in RISC OS, Microsoft Windows and Macintosh System 7.