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22-letter words containing p, o, e

  • borderline personality — Psychiatry. a personality disorder characterized by instability in many areas, as mood, identity, self-image, and behavior, and often manifested by impulsive actions, suicide attempts, inappropriate anger, or depression.
  • boundary value problem — any of a series of problems occurring in the solution of a differential equation with boundary conditions.
  • brachiocephalic artery — a major artery, arising from the arch of the aorta, that supplies blood to the right arm and the head.
  • break (or keep) faith — to be disloyal (or loyal) to one's beliefs, principles, etc.
  • bug-for-bug compatible — Same as bug-compatible, with the additional implication that much tedious effort went into ensuring that each (known) bug was replicated.
  • c programmer's disease — (programming)   The tendency of the undisciplined C programmer to set arbitrary but supposedly generous static limits on table sizes (defined, if you're lucky, by constants in header files) rather than taking the trouble to do proper dynamic storage allocation. If an application user later needs to put 68 elements into a table of size 50, the afflicted programmer reasons that he or she can easily reset the table size to 68 (or even as much as 70, to allow for future expansion) and recompile. This gives the programmer the comfortable feeling of having made the effort to satisfy the user's (unreasonable) demands, and often affords the user multiple opportunities to explore the marvellous consequences of fandango on core. In severe cases of the disease, the programmer cannot comprehend why each fix of this kind seems only to further disgruntle the user.
  • carpal tunnel syndrome — a condition characterized by pain and tingling in the fingers, caused by pressure on a nerve as it passes under the ligament situated across the front of the wrist
  • categorical imperative — (in the ethics of Kant) the unconditional moral principle that one's behaviour should accord with universalizable maxims which respect persons as ends in themselves; the obligation to do one's duty for its own sake and not in pursuit of further ends
  • certificate of deposit — a negotiable certificate issued by a bank in return for a deposit of money for a term of up to five years
  • challenge to the polls — an objection by counsel to one or more of the individual jurors called to a trial
  • chemical sympathectomy — the chemical destruction of one or more parts of the sympathetic nervous system
  • chemical-sympathectomy — sympathectomy (def 2).
  • chip off the old block — a person who resembles one of his or her parents in behaviour
  • chip on one's shoulder — an inclination to fight or quarrel
  • cockpit voice recorder — a device which records conversations in and communications from the cockpit of an aircraft
  • collective pitch lever — a lever in a helicopter to change the angle of attack of all the rotor blades simultaneously, causing it to rise or descend
  • color graphics adapter — (hardware, graphics)   (CGA) One of IBM's earliest hardware video display standards for use in IBM PCs. CGA can display 80*25 or 40*25 text in 16 colors, 640*200 pixels of graphics in two colors or 320*200 in four colors (IBM PC video modes 0-6). It is now obsolete.
  • colorado potato beetle — a black and yellow leaf beetle, Leptinotarsa decemlineata, originally of Colorado and neighboring states but now a common pest in all potato-growing regions of the U.S.
  • come up with the goods — If you deliver the goods or come up with the goods, you do what is expected or required of you.
  • comma separated values — (file format)   (CSV) A file format used as a portable representation of a database. Each line is one entry or record and the fields in a record are separated by commas. Commas may be followed by arbitrary space and/or tab characters which are ignored. If field includes a comma, the whole field must be surrounded with double quotes.
  • common situs picketing — the picketing of an entire construction project by a union having a dispute with only one subcontractor working at the site.
  • common snapping turtle — a large aggressive North American river turtle, Chelydra serpentina, having powerful hooked jaws and a rough shell
  • common-situs picketing — the picketing of an entire construction site by a union striking against a particular contractor or subcontractor working on only one section
  • compactness preserving — (theory)   In domain theory, a function f is compactness preserving if f c is compact whenever c is.
  • company sergeant major — the senior Warrant Officer II in a British or Commonwealth regiment or battalion, responsible under the company second in command for all aspects of duty and discipline of the NCOs and men in that subunit
  • comparative government — the study and comparison of different forms of government.
  • comparative literature — the comparative study of various national literatures, stressing their influence one upon another, their use of similar forms, their treatment of similar themes, etc.
  • comparative musicology — ethnomusicology.
  • comparative psychology — the study of the similarities and differences in the behaviour of different species
  • compass deviation card — a card, sheet, or the like, with two compass roses printed on it concentrically, for recording, on a given voyage, the amount of deviation for which the navigator must compensate in using the ship's compass to steer a magnetic course.
  • complementary medicine — the treatment, alleviation, or prevention of disease by such techniques as osteopathy, homeopathy, aromatherapy, and acupuncture, allied with attention to such factors as diet and emotional stability, which can affect a person's wellbeing
  • complete metamorphosis — physical changes in the development of certain insects that include egg, larva, pupa, and adult stages, as in beetles, moths, or bees
  • complete quadrilateral — a polygon consisting of four lines and their six points of intersection
  • component architecture — (programming)   A notion in object-oriented programming where "components" of a program are completely generic. Instead of having a specialised set of methods and fields they have generic methods through which the component can advertise the functionality it supports to the system into which it is loaded. This enables completely dynamic loading of objects. JavaBeans is an example of a component architecture. See also design pattern.
  • component object model — (programming)   (COM) An open software architecture from DEC and Microsoft, allowing interoperation between ObjectBroker and OLE. Microsoft evolved COM into DCOM. On page XV of Box's book in the foreword by Charlie Kindel he says, "It is Mark Ryland's fault that some people call COM the 'Common Object Model.' He deeply regrets it and apologizes profusely."
  • compound annual return — the total return available from an investment, deposit, etc, when the interest earned is used to augment the capital
  • compuserve corporation — (company)   The parent organisation of CompuServe Information Service, CompuServe Network Services and CompuServe Remote Computing Services. CompuServe was owned by H.R. Block but is now (1999) owned by America On-Line.
  • computational geometry — (mathematics)   The study of algorithms for combinatorial, topological, and metric problems concerning sets of points, typically in Euclidean space. Representative areas of research include geometric search, convexity, proximity, intersection, and linear programming.
  • computational learning — grammatical inference
  • concurrent massey hope — (language, functional programming)   An extension of Massey Hope, by Peter Burgess, Robert Pointon, and Nigel Perry <[email protected]> of Massey University, NZ, that provides multithreading and typed inter-thread communication. It uses C for intermediate code rather than assembly language.
  • connecticut compromise — a compromise adopted at the Constitutional Convention, providing the states with equal representation in the Senate and proportional representation in the House of Representatives.
  • conservation of parity — the principle that the parity of the total wave function describing a system of elementary particles is conserved. In fact it is not conserved in weak interactions
  • continental philosophy — a general term for related philosophical traditions that originated in 20th-century continental Europe, including critical theory, deconstruction, existentialism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and structuralism (contrasted with analytic philosophy).
  • contract of employment — a written agreement between an employer and an employee, that, taken together with the rights of each under statute and common law, determines the employment relations between them
  • cornell list processor — (CLP) A list processing language, an extension of CORC, used for simulation.
  • corporate headquarters — the main offices of a corporation, from where it runs its business
  • corporate manslaughter — the death of someone caused by an act of corporate negligence
  • correspondence college — an educational institution that runs courses and keeps in contact with its students by post
  • corrupt practices acts — laws limiting contributions to and expenditures in election campaigns, making illegal certain methods of influencing voters, etc.
  • cosmological principle — the theory that the universe is uniform, homogenous, and isotropic, and therefore appears the same from any position
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