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21-letter words containing o, s, t, r

  • bad conduct discharge — a discharge of a person from military service for an offense less serious than one for which a dishonorable discharge is given.
  • banach-tarski paradox — (mathematics)   It is possible to cut a solid ball into finitely many pieces (actually about half a dozen), and then put the pieces together again to get two solid balls, each the same size as the original. This paradox is a consequence of the Axiom of Choice.
  • barbiturate poisoning — poisoning caused by overdose of a barbiturate
  • basis of articulation — a configuration of the speech tract that represents the most neutral articulatory configuration for a given language.
  • be on the danger list — to be critically ill in hospital
  • be run off one's feet — to be very busy
  • beat one's brains out — Anatomy, Zoology. the part of the central nervous system enclosed in the cranium of humans and other vertebrates, consisting of a soft, convoluted mass of gray and white matter and serving to control and coordinate the mental and physical actions.
  • before-and-after test — a test which compares the state or function of something before intervention or modification, and after it
  • bernadette of lourdes — Saint. original name Marie Bernarde Soubirous. 1844–79, French peasant girl born in Lourdes, whose visions of the Virgin Mary led to the establishment of Lourdes as a centre of pilgrimage, esp for the sick or crippled. Feast day: Feb 18
  • binomial distribution — a statistical distribution giving the probability of obtaining a specified number of successes in a specified number of independent trials of an experiment with a constant probability of success in each. Symbol: Bi (n, p), where n is the number of trials and p the probability of success in each
  • biological psychiatry — a school of psychiatric thought concerned with the medical treatment of mental disorders, especially through medication, and emphasizing the relationship between behavior and brain function and the search for physical causes of mental illness.
  • bjornstjerne bjornson — Björnstjerne [byœrn-styer-nuh] /ˈbyœrnˌstyɛr nə/ (Show IPA), 1832–1910, Norwegian poet, novelist, and playwright: Nobel Prize 1903.
  • blow one's brains out — to kill oneself by shooting oneself in the head
  • bottlebrush moustache — a short, bristly moustache
  • 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 north america — (formerly) Canada or its constituent regions or provinces that formed part of the British Empire
  • 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.
  • butterfly common lisp — A parallel version of Common LISP for the BBN Butterfly computer.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • catalyst-to-oil ratio — The catalyst-to-oil ratio is the amount of a catalyst relative to the amount of oil, which with temperature affects the yield of a process.
  • 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.
  • characteristic vector — a vector for which there exists a scalar such that the value of the vector under a given transformation is equal to the scalar times the vector.
  • charity commissioners — (in Britain) members of a commission constituted to keep a register of charities and control charitable trusts
  • charterhouse of parma — a novel (1839) by Stendhal.
  • chinese forget-me-not — an eastern Asian plant, Cynoglossum amabile, of the borage family, having lance-shaped leaves and clustered, showy, blue, pink, or white flowers.
  • 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
  • christmas decorations — decorations of different kinds appropriate to Christmas, such as tinsel, candles, images of angels, etc.
  • church-rosser theorem — (theory)   A property of a reduction system that states that if an expression can be reduced by zero or more reduction steps to either expression M or expression N then there exists some other expression to which both M and N can be reduced. This implies that there is a unique normal form for any expression since M and N cannot be different normal forms because the theorem says they can be reduced to some other expression and normal forms are irreducible by definition. It does not imply that a normal form is reachable, only that if reduction terminates it will reach a unique normal form.
  • civil rights movement — campaign for human freedoms
  • 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.
  • clerk to the justices — (in England) a legally qualified person who sits in court with lay justices to advise them on points of law
  • clostridium difficile — Clostridium difficile is a bacterium that causes severe diarrhoea. It is commonly found in hospitals. C.diff is also used.
  • 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
  • communications server — (operating system)   IBM's rebranding of ACF.
  • 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.
  • compensation neurosis — an unconscious attempt to retain physical or psychological symptoms of illness when some advantage may be obtained (distinguished from malingering).
  • complete metric space — (theory)   A metric space in which every sequence that converges in itself has a limit. For example, the space of real numbers is complete by Dedekind's axiom, whereas the space of rational numbers is not - e.g. the sequence a[0]=1; a[n_+1]:=a[n]/2+1/a[n].
  • completing the square — a method, usually of solving quadratic equations, by which a quadratic expression, as x 2 − 4 x + 3, is written as the sum or difference of a perfect square and a constant, x 2 − 4 x + 4 + 3 − 4 = (x − 2) 2 − 1, by addition and subtraction of appropriate constant terms.
  • composition of forces — the combination, by vector algebra, of two or more forces into a single equivalent force (the resultant)
  • computer aided design — (application)   (CAD) The part of CAE concerning the drawing or physical layout steps of engineering design. Often found in the phrase "CAD/CAM" for ".. manufacturing".
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