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16-letter words containing n

  • at the sharp end — If you say that someone is at the sharp end of a particular activity or type of work, you mean that they are involved in the most difficult or dangerous aspects of it.
  • athanasian creed — a profession of faith widely used in the Western Church which, although formerly attributed to Athanasius, probably originated in Gaul between 381 and 428 ad
  • atlantic charter — the joint declaration issued by F. D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on Aug 14, 1941, consisting of eight principles to guide a postwar settlement
  • atlantic croaker — a person or thing that croaks.
  • atomic mass unit — a unit of mass used to express atomic and molecular weights that is equal to one twelfth of the mass of an atom of carbon-12. It is equivalent to 1.66 × 10–27 kg
  • atrioventricular — of, relating to, or affecting both the atria and the ventricles of the heart
  • attendance order — (in Britain) an order issued by a court requiring a young offender to attend a specified place at specified times in order to carry out unpaid work, usually as an alternative to being fined
  • attendance sheet — an official document for listing those attending a meeting, class, course, etc
  • attitude of mind — Your attitude of mind is your general way of thinking and feeling.
  • attorney general — A country's Attorney General is its chief law officer, who advises its government or ruler.
  • attorney-in-fact — a person authorized by power of attorney to act on the authorizer's behalf outside a court of law.
  • attributive noun — a noun that occurs before and modifies another noun, as toy in toy store or tour in tour group.
  • atwood's machine — a device consisting of two unequal masses connected by a string passed over a pulley, used to illustrate the laws of motion.
  • auckland islands — a group of six uninhabited islands, south of New Zealand. Area: 611 sq km (234 sq miles)
  • auction pinochle — a variety of pinochle for three to five players in which, for every hand, there are three active players, each dealt 15 cards, with the highest bidder winning the contract and playing against the other two active opponents.
  • audience chamber — a room where a monarch or head of state conducts formal interviews
  • audience figures — the number of people regularly watching a television programme or listening to a radio programme
  • audio conference — a meeting that is conducted by the use of audio telecommunications
  • aulnay-sous-bois — a town in N central France, a suburb NE of Paris.
  • aung san suu kyi — born 1945, Burmese politician; cofounder (1988) and general secretary (1988–91 and from 1995) of the National League for Democracy: Nobel peace prize 1991; released (2010) from a lengthy house arrest; elected to the Burmese House of Representatives in 2012
  • aureate language — a style of poetic diction, used originally in 15th-century English poetry, characterized by the use of ornate phrases and Latinized coinages.
  • australian crawl — a stroke in which the feet are kicked like paddles while the arms reach forward and pull back through the water
  • australian rules — a game resembling rugby football, played in Australia between teams of 18 men each on an oval pitch, with a ball resembling a large rugby ball. Players attempt to kick the ball between posts (without crossbars) at either end of the pitch, scoring six points for a goal (between the two main posts) and one point for a behind (between either of two outer posts and the main posts). They may punch or kick the ball and run with it provided that they bounce it every ten yards
  • austro-hungarian — of or relating to the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary (1867–1918)
  • authentification — The process of making, or establishing as, authentic.
  • authoritarianism — Authoritarianism is the state of being authoritarian or the belief that people with power, especially the State, have the right to control other people's actions.
  • autoethnographic — Using ethnographic techniques to describe one's own life, or events in which one is a participant.
  • autofluorescence — (biology, microscopy) Self-induced fluorescence.
  • autoimmunization — antibody production by an organism in response to and against any of its own tissues, cells, or cell components.
  • autointoxication — self-poisoning caused by absorption of toxic products originating within the body
  • automanipulation — physical stimulation of one's own genitals.
  • automatrix, inc. — (company)   The company which produced CAM-PC. Address: Ballston Spa, NY, USA.
  • autotransformers — Plural form of autotransformer.
  • autotransfusions — Plural form of autotransfusion.
  • autumnal equinox — the time at which the sun crosses the plane of the equator away from the relevant hemisphere, making day and night of equal length. It occurs about Sept 23 in the N hemisphere (March 21 in the S hemisphere)
  • avail oneself of — to make use of to one's advantage
  • avalon peninsula — a large peninsula of Newfoundland, between Trinity and Placentia Bays. Area: about 10 000 sq km (4000 sq miles)
  • aversion therapy — a method of suppressing an undesirable habit, such as excessive smoking, by causing the subject to associate an unpleasant effect, such as an electric shock or nausea, with the habit
  • avian diphtheria — a virus disease of chickens and other birds characterized by warty excrescences on the comb and wattles, and often by diphtherialike changes in the mucous membranes of the head.
  • axminster carpet — a type of patterned carpet with a cut pile
  • azodicarbonamide — (chemistry) An organic chemical, a yellow to orange red, odorless, crystalline powder, used in food industry as a food additive, a flour bleaching agent and improving agent and in foaming plastics.
  • azuero peninsula — a peninsula in SW Panama, bordered on the E by the Gulf of Panama.
  • babe-in-a-cradle — a tall orchid, Epiblema grandiflorum, of SW Australia with lilac to mauve flowers
  • babylonian exile — the exile of the Jews, deported by Nebuchadnezzar into Babylonia in 597 b.c. and permitted to return by Cyrus in 538 b.c.
  • back-propagation — (Or "backpropagation") A learning algorithm for modifying a feed-forward neural network which minimises a continuous "error function" or "objective function." Back-propagation is a "gradient descent" method of training in that it uses gradient information to modify the network weights to decrease the value of the error function on subsequent tests of the inputs. Other gradient-based methods from numerical analysis can be used to train networks more efficiently. Back-propagation makes use of a mathematical trick when the network is simulated on a digital computer, yielding in just two traversals of the network (once forward, and once back) both the difference between the desired and actual output, and the derivatives of this difference with respect to the connection weights.
  • background check — an investigation into a person's origins and previous history
  • background music — music of any kind that is played while some other activity is going on, so that people do not actively attend to it
  • background noise — any type of noise that is not the sound that you are specifically listening to or monitoring
  • background paper — a report or other piece of writing that is intended to provide contextual and historical information that will help people understand a particular topic or situation
  • backus-naur form — (language, grammar)   (BNF, originally "Backus Normal Form") A formal metasyntax used to express context-free grammars. Backus Normal Form was renamed Backus-Naur Form at the suggestion of Donald Knuth. BNF is one of the most commonly used metasyntactic notations for specifying the syntax of programming languages, command sets, and the like. It is widely used for language descriptions but seldom documented anywhere (how do you document a metasyntax?), so that it must usually be learned by osmosis (but see RFC 2234). Consider this BNF for a US postal address: ::= ::= | "." ::= [] | ::= [] ::= "," This translates into English as: "A postal-address consists of a name-part, followed by a street-address part, followed by a zip-code part. A personal-part consists of either a first name or an initial followed by a dot. A name-part consists of either: a personal-part followed by a last name followed by an optional "jr-part" (Jr., Sr., or dynastic number) and end-of-line, or a personal part followed by a name part (this rule illustrates the use of recursion in BNFs, covering the case of people who use multiple first and middle names and/or initials). A street address consists of an optional apartment specifier, followed by a street number, followed by a street name. A zip-part consists of a town-name, followed by a comma, followed by a state code, followed by a ZIP-code followed by an end-of-line." Note that many things (such as the format of a personal-part, apartment specifier, or ZIP-code) are left unspecified. These lexical details are presumed to be obvious from context or specified somewhere nearby. There are many variants and extensions of BNF, possibly containing some or all of the regexp wild cards such as "*" or "+". EBNF is a common one. In fact the example above isn't the pure form invented for the ALGOL 60 report. "[]" was introduced a few years later in IBM's PL/I definition but is now universally recognised. ABNF is another extension.
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