20-letter words containing o, g, r, a
- bring home the bacon — If you bring home the bacon, you achieve what you needed to achieve.
- broadcasting station — a television or radio station
- brown lung (disease) — a chronic disease of the lungs caused by inhalation of fine textile fibers, esp. cotton; byssinosis
- california gold fern — an evergreen fern, Pityrogramma triangularis, growing from British Columbia to California, having the underside of the leaves covered with a deep yellow, powderlike substance.
- carbohydrate loading — the practice of eating high amounts of carbohydrates, sometimes after a period of low carbohydrate intake, for several days immediately before competing in an athletic event, especially a marathon, in order to store glycogen in the body, thereby providing greater reserves of energy.
- career limiting move — (jargon) (CLM, Sun) Any action endangering one's future prospects of getting plum projects and raises, and possibly one's job. E.g. "His Halloween costume was a parody of his manager. He won the prize for "best CLM"." A severe bug discovered by a customer might be a "CLM bug".
- case based reasoning — (artificial intelligence) (CBR) A technique for problem solving which looks for previous examples which are similar to the current problem. This is useful where heuristic knowledge is not available. There are many situations where experts are not happy to be questioned about their knowledge by people who want to write the knowledge in rules, for use in expert systems. In most of these situations, the natural way for an expert to describe his or her knowledge is through examples, stories or cases (which are all basically the same thing). Such an expert will teach trainees about the expertise by apprenticeship, i.e. by giving examples and by asking the trainees to remember them, copy them and adapt them in solving new problems if they describe situations that are similar to the new problems. CBR aims to exploit such knowledge. Some key research areas are efficient indexing, how to define "similarity" between cases and how to use temporal information.
- cassegrain telescope — an astronomical reflecting telescope in which incident light is reflected from a large concave paraboloid mirror onto a smaller convex hyperboloid mirror and then back through a hole in the concave mirror to form the image
- cerebral haemorrhage — bleeding from an artery in the brain, which in severe cases causes a stroke
- change a reservation — If you change a reservation, you move a booking to a different date because someone who has booked a room has informed you that they wish to stay there on a different date.
- change-speed gearbox — A change-speed gearbox is a set of movable or constant gears which allows the speed ratio between input and output shafts to be changed either manually or automatically.
- child support agency — the British government agency concerned with the welfare of children
- chromaticity diagram — a diagram in which values of two chromaticity coordinates are marked on a pair of rectangular axes, a point in the plane of these axes representing the chromaticity of any colour
- chrono-logical order — the arrangement of things following one after another in time: Put these documents in chronological order.
- coalition government — a government containing members of two or more political parties
- collective agreement — a negotiated agreement, which is not enforceable at law, between an employer and employees' representatives, covering rates of pay or terms and conditions of employment, or both
- college of cardinals — the collective body of cardinals having the function of electing and advising the pope
- comparative judgment — any judgment about whether there is a difference between two or more stimuli
- comparative religion — a field of study seeking to derive general principles from a comparison and classification of the growth and influence of various religions.
- compensatory damages — sum paid for a loss
- complementary angles — either of two angles that added together produce an angle of 90°.
- composite photograph — a photograph formed by superimposing two or more separate photographs
- computer programming — the activity or profession of writing computer programs
- computing dictionary — Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
- confectioners' sugar — Confectioners' sugar is very fine white sugar that is used for making icing and candy.
- congressional record — (in the US) the government journal that publishes all proceedings of Congress
- congressman-at-large — (in the US) a member of the House of Representatives who was elected by the voters of an entire state as opposed to the voters of a single Congressional district
- context-free grammar — (grammar) (CFG) A grammar where the syntax of each constituent (syntactic category or terminal symbol) is independent of the symbols occuring before and after it in a sentence. A context-free grammar describes a context-free language. Context-free grammars can be expressed by a set of "production rules" or syntactic rules. For example, a language with symbols "a" and "b" that must occur in unequal numbers can be represented by the CFG: S → U | V U → TaU | TaT | UaT V → TbV | TbT | VbT T → aTbT | bTaT | ε meaning the top-level category "S" consists of either a "U" or a "V" and so on. The special category "ε" represents the empty string. This grammar is context-free because each rule has a single symbol on its left-hand side.
- continental congress — the assembly of delegates from the North American rebel colonies held during and after the War of American Independence. It issued the Declaration of Independence (1776) and framed the Articles of Confederation (1777)
- contradistinguishing — Present participle of contradistinguish.
- convective discharge — the repulsion of ions of a gas by a highly charged body, creating a discernible wind.
- corporate governance — the balance of control between the stakeholders, managers, and directors of an organization
- corresponding angles — a pair of nonadjacent angles, one interior and one exterior, on the same side of a transversal: these paired angles are equal if the lines cut by the transversal are parallel
- corrugated cardboard — cardboard usually made of three different layers, the two outer layers having a smooth surface while the central inner layer is corrugated
- council-manager plan — (in the US) a system of local government with an elected legislative council and an appointed administrative manager
- creative imagination — the faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.
- criminal proceedings — action taken in a court to bring a criminal prosecution against someone
- cut the gordian knot — to find a quick, bold solution for a perplexing problem
- de facto segregation — racial, ethnic, or other segregation resulting from societal differences between groups, as socioeconomic or political disparity, without institutionalized legislation intended to segregate.
- declaratory judgment — a judgment that merely decides the rights of parties in a given transaction, situation, or dispute but does not order any action or award damages.
- decompartmentalizing — Present participle of decompartmentalize.
- demographic timebomb — a predicted shortage of school-leavers and consequently of available workers, caused by an earlier drop in the birth rate, resulting in an older workforce
- department of energy — the department of the U.S. federal government that sets forth and maintains the national energy policy, including energy conservation, environmental protection, etc. Abbreviation: DOE.
- developing-out paper — a sensitized printing paper requiring development in order to bring out the image. Abbreviation: D.O.P.
- diamond in the rough — a diamond in its natural state
- dictionary catalogue — a catalogue of the authors, titles, and subjects of books in one alphabetical sequence
- differential housing — the casing that houses the differential of a motor vehicle
- directional drilling — a method of drilling for oil in which the well is not drilled vertically, as when a number of wells are to be drilled from a single platform to reach different areas of an oil field
- directory user agent — (DUA) The software that accesses the X.500 Directory Service on behalf of the directory user. The directory user may be a person or another software element.
- dispersion hardening — the strengthening of an alloy as a result of the presence of fine particles in the lattice