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24-letter words containing o, t, e

  • bidouilleurs sans argent — (body)   (BSA, French for "Moneyless Hackers") An association which aim is to help computer users who can't afford to buy commercial software. The main purpose of the association is the promotion of free software, and distribution of ex-commercial software. This is clearly an answer to the repressive attitude of the "other" BSA. Among BSA members are Richard Stallman, creator of the GNU project.
  • 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
  • bottom-up implementation — (programming)   The opposite of top-down design. It is now received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to *build* things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive operations and then knitting them together.
  • 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
  • broad-leaved bottle tree — any of several trees of the genus Brachychiton, native to Australia, characterized by a bottle-shaped swelling of the trunk, as B. rupestris (narrow-leaved bottle tree) or B. australis (broad-leaved bottle tree)
  • broadleaved spindle tree — a flowering tree, Euonymus Latifolius, native to some parts of Western Europe and widely planted as an ornamental
  • browning automatic rifle — an air-cooled, fully automatic rifle capable of firing 200 to 350 rounds per minute. Abbreviation: BAR.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • butylated hydroxytoluene — BHT.
  • 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.
  • by/through the back door — If you say that someone gets or does something by the back door or through the back door, you are criticizing them for doing it secretly and unofficially.
  • californian spangled cat — a breed of short-haired cat with a spotted coat, bred in California to resemble a leopard in appearance
  • campbell-stokes recorder — an instrument for recording hours of sunshine per day, consisting of a solid glass sphere that focuses rays of sunlight onto a light-sensitive card on which a line is burnt
  • carcinoembryonic antigen — a glycoprotein found in serum, urine, etc. that is associated with various types of tumors: monitoring its levels is useful in treating cancer patients
  • 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
  • cathode ray oscilloscope — A cathode ray oscilloscope is an instrument based upon the cathode ray tube, that provides a visible image of one or more rapidly varying electrical quantities.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • circuit court of appeals — court of appeals (sense 2)
  • 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 variation — a measure of the relative variation of distribution independent of the units of measurement; the standard deviation divided by the mean, sometimes expressed as a percentage
  • 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.
  • cog in the machine/wheel — If you describe someone as a cog in a machine or wheel, you mean that they are a small part of a large organization or group.
  • combat infantryman badge — a badge awarded to an infantryman in recognition of satisfactory performance of duty in ground combat against the enemy.
  • come out of the woodwork — If you say that people are coming out of the woodwork, you are criticizing them for suddenly appearing in public or revealing their opinions when previously they did not make themselves known.
  • 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.
  • command-line interpreter — command interpreter
  • common gateway interface — (web)   (CGI) A standard for running external programs from a web HTTP server. CGI specifies how to pass arguments to the program as part of the HTTP request. It also defines a set of environment variables that are made available to the program. The program generates output, typically HTML, which the web server processes and passes back to the browser. Alternatively, the program can request URL redirection. CGI allows the returned output to depend in any arbitrary way on the request. The CGI program can, for example, access information in a database and format the results as HTML. The program can access any data that a normal application program can, however the facilities available to CGI programs are usually limited for security reasons. Although CGI programs can be compiled programs, they are more often written in a (semi) interpreted language such as Perl, or as Unix shell scripts, hence the common name "CGI script". Here is a trivial CGI script written in Perl. (It requires the "CGI" module available from CPAN). #!/usr/bin/perl use CGI qw(:standard); print header, start_html, h1("CGI Test"), "Your IP address is: ", remote_host(), end_html; When run it produces an HTTP header and then a simple HTML page containing the IP address or hostname of the machine that generated the initial request. If run from a command prompt it outputs: Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Untitled Document

    CGI Test

    Your IP address is: localhost The CGI program might be saved as the file "test.pl" in the appropriate directory on a web server, e.g. "/home/httpd/test". Accessing the appropriate URL, e.g. http://acme.com/test/test.pl, would cause the program to run and a custom page produced and returned. Early web servers required all CGI programs to be installed in one directory called cgi-bin but it is better to keep them with the HTML files to which they relate unless they are truly global to the site. Similarly, it is neither necessary nor desirable for all CGI programs to have the extension ".cgi". Each CGI request is handled by a new process. If the process fails to terminate for some reason, or if requests are received faster than the server can respond to them, the server may become swamped with processes. In order to improve performance, Netscape devised NSAPI and Microsoft developed the ISAPI standard which allow CGI-like tasks to run as part of the main server process, thus avoiding the overhead of creating a new process to handle each CGI invocation. Other solutions include mod_perl and FastCGI.
  • common information model — (standard)   (CIM) An open systems management standard driven by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).
  • common program interface — (programming)   (CPI) The API of SAA.
  • communications satellite — an artificial satellite used to relay radio, television, and telephone signals around the earth, usually in geostationary orbit
  • communicative competence — a speaker's internalized knowledge both of the grammatical rules of a language and of the rules for appropriate use in social contexts.
  • 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).
  • compiler target language — (CTL) The intermediate language used by the ALICE parallel machine.
  • complement fixation test — a serological test for detecting the presence of a specific antibody or antigen, used in the diagnosis of syphilis, etc
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