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18-letter words containing r, e, s, h

  • come home to roost — If bad or wrong things that someone has done in the past have come home to roost, or if their chickens have come home to roost, they are now experiencing the unpleasant effects of these actions.
  • come to grips with — If you come to grips with a problem, you consider it seriously, and start taking action to deal with it.
  • come to terms with — If you come to terms with something difficult or unpleasant, you learn to accept and deal with it.
  • comparison shopper — an employee of a retail store hired to visit competing stores in order to gather information regarding styles, quality, prices, etc., of merchandise offered by competitors.
  • comprehensibleness — The quality of being comprehensible; comprehensibility.
  • congregate housing — a type of housing in which each individual or family has a private bedroom or living quarters but shares with other residents a common dining room, recreational room, or other facilities.
  • connected subgraph — (mathematics)   A connected graph consisting of a subset of the nodes and edges of some other graph.
  • considered harmful — (programming, humour)   A type of phrase based on the title of Edsger W. Dijkstra's famous note in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM, "Goto Statement Considered Harmful", which fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars. Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by policy) no longer print articles taking so assertive a position against a coding practice. In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and parodies bore titles of the form "X considered Y". The structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the realisation that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke.
  • conversation chair — an English chair of the 18th century designed to be straddled facing the back of the chair with the elbows resting on the crest rail: an English imitation of the voyeuse.
  • cordless telephone — a portable battery-powered telephone with a short-range radio link to a fixed base unit
  • cornucopian thesis — the belief that, as long as science and technology continue to advance, growth can continue for ever because these new advances create new resources
  • corpuscular theory — the theory, originally proposed by Newton, and revived with the development of the quantum theory, that light consists of a stream of particles
  • cot death syndrome — the unexplained sudden death of an infant during sleep
  • counter-hypothesis — a proposition, or set of propositions, set forth as an explanation for the occurrence of some specified group of phenomena, either asserted merely as a provisional conjecture to guide investigation (working hypothesis) or accepted as highly probable in the light of established facts.
  • cranial osteopathy — osteopathy that focuses on the cranium and the spine
  • creatine phosphate — phosphocreatine.
  • crested flycatcher — any of various tyrant flycatchers (esp. genus Myiarchus) with a prominent crest
  • crested wheatgrass — a forage grass, Agropyron cristatum, native to Eurasia and grown in the Great Plains as pasturage, hay, and for erosion control.
  • crystal microphone — a microphone that uses a piezoelectric crystal to convert sound energy into electrical energy
  • cushing's syndrome — a medical condition characterized by obesity, hypertension, excessive hair growth, etc., caused by an overactive adrenal gland or large doses of corticosteroids
  • cytoarchitectonics — Cytoarchitecture.
  • daisywheel printer — (printer)   A kind of impact printer where the characters are arranged on the ends of the spokes of a wheel (resembling the petals on a daisy). The wheel (usually made of plastic) is rotated to select the character to print and then an electrically operated hammer mechanism bends the selected spoke forward slightly, sandwiching an ink ribbon between the character and the paper, as in a typewriter. One advantage of this arrangement over that of a typewriter is that different wheels may be inserted to produce different typefaces.
  • deanthropomorphism — the ridding of philosophy or religion of anthropomorphic beliefs and doctrines.
  • dechristianization — The act of dechristianizing; the systematic removal of Christianity or Christian elements.
  • deep-sea fisherman — a person who takes part in deep-sea fishing
  • demorgan's theorem — (logic)   A logical theorem which states that the complement of a conjunction is the disjunction of the complements or vice versa. In symbols: not (x and y) = (not x) or (not y) not (x or y) = (not x) and (not y) E.g. if it is not the case that I am tall and thin then I am either short or fat (or both). The theorem can be extended to combinations of more than two terms in the obvious way. The same laws also apply to sets, replacing logical complement with set complement, conjunction ("and") with set intersection, and disjunction ("or") with set union. A (C) programmer might use this to re-write if (!foo && !bar) ... as if (!(foo || bar)) ... thus saving one operator application (though an optimising compiler should do the same, leaving the programmer free to use whichever form seemed clearest).
  • dendrochronologist — One who carries out dendrochronology.
  • depth-first search — (algorithm)   A graph search algorithm which extends the current path as far as possible before backtracking to the last choice point and trying the next alternative path. Depth-first search may fail to find a solution if it enters a cycle in the graph. This can be avoided if we never extend a path to a node which it already contains. Opposite of breadth first search. See also iterative deepening.
  • destruct mechanism — a mechanism that causes the destruction of a rocket or missile when activated
  • devil's paintbrush — a perennial European hawkweed (Hieracium aurantiacum) with leafless flower stalks bearing a cluster of orange-red heads: now a common weed in N U.S. and Canada
  • diatomaceous earth — an unconsolidated form of diatomite
  • diethylstilbestrol — a nonsteroidal synthetic estrogen, C 18 H 20 O 2 , used in medicine chiefly in the treatment of menopausal symptoms and in animal feeds for chemical caponization: formerly used during pregnancy for the prevention of miscarriage but discontinued owing to its association with an increased risk of vaginal and cervical cancers in women having had fetal exposure. Abbreviation: DES.
  • digital switchover — the process of changing the method of transmitting television from analogue to digital format
  • dihydrotachysterol — a white, crystalline, water-insoluble sterol, C 28 H 46 O, derived from ergosterol: used chiefly in the treatment of hypoparathyroidism.
  • diphosphoglycerate — an ester of phosphoric acid and glyceric acid that occurs in the blood and that promotes the release of hemoglobin-bound oxygen.
  • discharge printing — a fabric-printing method in which the material is dyed and then certain areas are discharged so as to permit the original hue or its color replacement to act as a pattern against the colored ground.
  • disenfranchisement — to disfranchise.
  • dr. james h. clark — (person)   The founder of Silicon Graphics, Inc. and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation.
  • duchenne dystrophy — the most common form of muscular dystrophy, usually affecting only boys
  • duty-free shopping — the making of duty-free purchases
  • dysthymic disorder — a psychiatric disorder characterized by generalized depression that lasts for at least a year
  • earnings per share — the net income of a corporation divided by the total number of shares of its common stock outstanding at a given time. Abbreviation: EPS.
  • eastern hemisphere — the eastern part of the terrestrial globe, including Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe.
  • eggshell porcelain — a type of very thin translucent porcelain originally made in China
  • electric discharge — electricity emitted
  • equine herpesvirus — a viral disease of horses that may cause respiratory signs, abortion, neonatal death, and paresis. A vaccine is available against this disease
  • established church — a Church that is officially recognized as a national institution, esp the Church of England
  • establishmentarian — Adhering to, advocating, or relating to the principle of an established church.
  • euclid's algorithm — (algorithm)   (Or "Euclidean Algorithm") An algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor (GCD) of two numbers. It relies on the identity gcd(a, b) = gcd(a-b, b) To find the GCD of two numbers by this algorithm, repeatedly replace the larger by subtracting the smaller from it until the two numbers are equal. E.g. 132, 168 -> 132, 36 -> 96, 36 -> 60, 36 -> 24, 36 -> 24, 12 -> 12, 12 so the GCD of 132 and 168 is 12. This algorithm requires only subtraction and comparison operations but can take a number of steps proportional to the difference between the initial numbers (e.g. gcd(1, 1001) will take 1000 steps).
  • exclusive brethren — one of the two main divisions of the Plymouth Brethren, which, in contrast to the Open Brethren, restricts its members' contacts with those outside the sect
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