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21-letter words containing o, u, a, n

  • 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
  • beyond (all) question — beyond (any) dispute or doubt
  • 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
  • binomial nomenclature — a system for naming plants and animals by means of two Latin names: the first indicating the genus and the second the species to which the organism belongs, as in Panthera leo (the lion)
  • blow one's brains out — to kill oneself by shooting oneself in the head
  • bluethroat pikeblenny — See under pikeblenny.
  • bottom-up programming — a programming technique in which lower-level modules are developed before higher-level modules.
  • breakthrough bleeding — bleeding from the uterus that occurs between menstrual periods
  • bromine pentafluoride — a colorless, corrosive liquid, BrF 5 , used as an oxidizer in liquid rocket propellants.
  • 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.
  • businessman's holiday — busman's holiday.
  • by fair means or foul — If someone tries to achieve something by fair means or foul, they use every means possible in order to achieve it, and they do not care if their behaviour is dishonest or unfair.
  • cantilever foundation — a building foundation supporting its load partly or wholly upon cantilevers.
  • caroline of brunswick — 1768–1821, wife of George IV of the United Kingdom: tried for adultery (1820)
  • central european time — the standard time adopted by Western European countries one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, corresponding to British Summer Time
  • chequebook journalism — Chequebook journalism is the practice of paying people large sums of money for information about crimes or famous people in order to get material for newspaper articles.
  • 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
  • chink in one's armour — a small but fatal weakness
  • circular polarization — electromagnetic radiation (esp light) in which the electric field vector describes a circle about the direction of propagation at any point in the path of the radiation
  • clayton antitrust act — an act of Congress in 1914 supplementing the Sherman Antitrust Act and establishing the FTC.
  • clayton-bulwer treaty — an agreement between the U.S. and Great Britain in 1850 guaranteeing that any canal built to connect the Atlantic and Pacific across Central America would be jointly controlled, open to all nations, and unfortified.
  • closed-angle glaucoma — angle-closure glaucoma. See under glaucoma.
  • 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.
  • column chromatography — the separation of mixtures into their constituents by preferential adsorption by a solid, as a column of silica (column chromatography) or a strip of filter paper (paper chromatography) or by a gel.
  • comfortably-furnished — containing comfortable furniture
  • communication science — the study of ways in which human beings communicate, including speech, gesture, telecommunication systems, publishing and broadcasting media, etc
  • communications server — (operating system)   IBM's rebranding of ACF.
  • community association — (in Britain) an organization of people and groups working for the common good of a neighbourhood, usually operating under a written constitution registered with the Charity Commissioners
  • compensation neurosis — an unconscious attempt to retain physical or psychological symptoms of illness when some advantage may be obtained (distinguished from malingering).
  • 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.
  • 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".
  • computer-aided design — the use of computer techniques in designing products, esp involving the use of computer graphics
  • compuware corporation — (company)   A US software and service company established in 1973. Since 1973, Compuware focused on optimising business software development, testing and operation. In 1999 the company had grown to over 15,000 employees worldwide and revenues of more than $1.6B. By 2013 it had shrunk to less than 5000. Current (2013) products and services include performance optimisation, availability and quality of web, non-web, mobile, streaming and cloud applications; project portfolio management, professional services automation; mainframe applications and developer tools; rapid application development and professional services.
  • confidence and supply — denoting an arrangement in a hung parliament in which an opposition party agrees not to vote against a minority government in votes of confidence or budgetary matters but reserves the right to oppose other legislation
  • congregational church — any evangelical Protestant Christian Church that is governed according to the principles of Congregationalism. In 1972 the majority of churches in the Congregational Church in England and Wales voted to become part of the United Reformed Church
  • consciousness raising — Consciousness raising is the process of developing awareness of an unfair situation, with the aim of making people want to help in changing it.
  • consciousness-raising — Psychology. a group-therapy technique in which the aim is to enhance the participants' awareness of their particular needs and goals as individuals or as a group.
  • constitutional strike — a stoppage of work by the workforce of an organization, with the approval of the trade union concerned, in accordance with the dispute procedure laid down in a collective agreement between the parties
  • constitutionalization — The act or process of establishing a constitution over a state or organization.
  • constitutive equation — A constitutive equation is an equation that describes the relationship between two physical quantities, for example between the stress put on a material and the strain produced on it.
  • consultation document — a report that is the result of a consultation process
  • consummatory behavior — a behavior pattern that occurs in response to a stimulus and that achieves the satisfaction of a specific drive, as the eating of captured prey by a hungry predator (distinguished from appetitive behavior).
  • contextual definition — definition of a word or symbol by explaining the meaning of the phrase or statement in which it occurs.
  • continuous assessment — If pupils or students undergo continuous assessment, they get qualifications partly or entirely based on the work they do during the year, rather than on exam results.
  • continuous stationery — paper that is perforated between pages and folded concertina fashion, used in dot-matrix, line, and daisywheel printers
  • convertible insurance — any form of life or health insurance, either individual or group, that enables the insured to change or convert the insurance to another form, as term to whole life insurance or group to individual health insurance.
  • coordination compound — complex (def 10).
  • coordination language — (networking, protocol)   A language defined specifically to allow two or more parties (components) to communicate in order to accomplish some shared goal. Examples of coordination languages are Linda and Xerox's CLF (STITCH).
  • corpus juris canonici — the official compilation of canon law published by authority of Gregory XIII in 1582, superseded by the Codex Juris Canonici in 1918
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