21-letter words containing r, h, e, a
- blackburn with darwen — a unitary authority in NW England, in Lancashire. Pop: 139 800 (2003 est). Area: 137 sq km (53 sq miles)
- bluethroat pikeblenny — See under pikeblenny.
- bonnie prince charlie — a member of the royal family that ruled in Scotland from 1371 to 1714 and in England from 1603 to 1714.
- bottlebrush moustache — a short, bristly moustache
- break someone's heart — an act or instance of breaking; disruption or separation of parts; fracture; rupture: There was a break in the window.
- break the fourth wall — (esp of a character in a television programme, film, or play) to refer to, acknowledge, or address the audience, usually for comedic effect or as an avante-garde technique
- breakthrough bleeding — bleeding from the uterus that occurs between menstrual periods
- breath-of-life packet — (XEROX PARC) An Ethernet packet that contains bootstrap code, periodically sent out from a working computer to infuse the "breath of life" into any computer on the network that has crashed. Computers depending on such packets have sufficient hardware or firmware code to wait for (or request) such a packet during the reboot process. See also dickless workstation. The notional "kiss-of-death packet", with a function complementary to that of a breath-of-life packet, is recommended for dealing with hosts that consume too many network resources. Though "kiss-of-death packet" is usually used in jest, there is at least one documented instance of an Internet subnet with limited address-table slots in a gateway computer in which such packets were routinely used to compete for slots, rather like Christmas shoppers competing for scarce parking spaces.
- british anti-lewisite — a colorless, oily, viscous liquid, C 3 H 8 OS 2 , originally developed as an antidote to lewisite and now used in treating bismuth, gold, mercury, and arsenic poisoning.
- british north america — (formerly) Canada or its constituent regions or provinces that formed part of the British Empire
- british sign language — the main sign language used by deaf people in the United Kingdom
- british standard time — the standard time used in Britain all the year round from 1968 to 1971, set one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time and equalling Central European Time
- broadleaved whitebeam — a whitebeam, Sorbus latifolia, widely found in France and England, also planted as an ornamental
- bryan-chamorro treaty — a treaty (1914) between the U.S. and Nicaragua by which the U.S. secured exclusive rights to build a canal across Nicaragua, to connect the Atlantic and Pacific.
- bursting at the seams — If a place is very full, you can say that it is bursting at the seams.
- carrie chapman l catt — Carrie Chapman Lane, 1859–1947, U.S. leader in women's suffrage movements.
- 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.
- catherine of braganza — 1638–1705, wife of Charles II of England, daughter of John IV of Portugal
- cause-effect graphing — (programming) A testing technique that aids in selecting, in a systematic way, a high-yield set of test cases that logically relates causes to effects to produce test cases. It has a beneficial side effect in pointing out incompleteness and ambiguities in specifications.
- caviar to the general — a thing appealing only to a highly cultivated taste: Hamlet II, ii
- central daylight time — the time observed in the Central Time Zone of the United states when Daylight Savings Time is in effect; GMT -5
- central limit theorem — any of several theorems stating that the sum of a number of random variables obeying certain conditions will assume a normal distribution as the number of variables becomes large.
- certificate authority — (cryptography, body) (CA or "Trusted Third Party") An entity (typically a company) that issues digital certificates to other entities (organisations or individuals) to allow them to prove their identity to others. A Certificate Authority might be an external company such as VeriSign that offers digital certificate services or they might be an internal organisation such as a corporate MIS department. The Certificate Authority's chief function is to verify the identity of entities and issue digital certificates attesting to that identity. The process uses public key cryptography to create a "network of trust". If I want to prove my identity to you, I ask a CA (who you trust to have verified my identity) to encrypt a hash of my signed key with their private key. Then you can use the CA's public key to decrypt the hash and compare it with a hash you calculate yourself. Hashes are used to decrease the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. The hash function must be cryptographically strong, e.g. MD5.
- character development — the portrayal of people in a work of fiction in such a way that the reader or audience seems to learn more about them as they develop
- character recognition — Character recognition is a process which allows computers to recognize written or printed characters such as numbers or letters and to change them into a form that the computer can use.
- 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.
- charge-coupled device — an electronic device, used in imaging and signal processing, in which information is represented as packets of electric charge that are stored in an array of tiny closely spaced capacitors and can be moved from one capacitor to another in a controlled way
- charity commissioners — (in Britain) members of a commission constituted to keep a register of charities and control charitable trusts
- charles edward stuart — a member of the royal family that ruled in Scotland from 1371 to 1714 and in England from 1603 to 1714.
- charterhouse of parma — a novel (1839) by Stendhal.
- cheese and wine party — a party at which cheese and wine are served
- cheque guarantee card — a card issued by a bank or building society, guaranteeing payment of a customer's cheques up to a stated value
- 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.
- chief master sergeant — a solider of the highest enlisted rank in the US Air Force
- chief warrant officer — a senior-ranking warrant officer in various armed forces
- chinese lantern plant — winter cherry (def 1).
- 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
- chinese-lantern plant — a perennial ground-cherry (Physalis alkekengi) grown for winter bouquets because of the bladderlike red calyx that surrounds its small, tomatolike fruit
- chink in one's armour — a small but fatal weakness
- christmas decorations — decorations of different kinds appropriate to Christmas, such as tinsel, candles, images of angels, etc.
- christmas tree packet — (networking) (Or kamikaze packet) A packet with every single option set for whatever protocol is in use. The term doubtless derives from a fanciful image of each little option bit being represented by a different-coloured light bulb, all turned on. 10 points for correctly being able to process a "Kamikaze" packet (AKA nastygram, Christmas tree packet, lamp test segment, et al.). That is, correctly handle a segment with the maximum combination of features at once (e.g. a SYN URG PUSH FIN segment with options and data). Compare: Chernobyl packet.
- 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.
- comfortably-furnished — containing comfortable furniture
- comparative philology — comparative linguistics.
- 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 architecture — the structure, behaviour, and design of computers
- conditional discharge — If someone who is convicted of an offence is given a conditional discharge by a court, they are not punished unless they later commit a further offence.
- 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
- constant mesh gearbox — A constant mesh gearbox is a type of transmission in which all forward gear pairs remain engaged.
- constantine the great — (Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus"the Great") a.d. 288?–337, Roman emperor 324–337: named Constantinople as the new capital; legally sanctioned Christian worship.