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18-letter words containing s, a, n

  • creeping featurism — (jargon)   /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ (Or "feature creep") A systematic tendency to load more chrome and features onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed. "The main problem with BSD Unix has always been creeping featurism." More generally, creeping featurism is the tendency for anything to become more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had this feature too". The result is usually a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone, and then another, and another, .... When creeping featurism gets out of hand, it's like a cancer. Usually this term is used to describe computer programs, but it could also be said of the federal government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A similar phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious redesigns; see second-system effect. See also creeping elegance.
  • creeping paralysis — any slow process that causes a system, government, etc, to stop working efficiently
  • critical constants — the physical constants that express the properties of a substance in its critical state
  • cross-disciplinary — linking two or more fields of study
  • crystal microphone — a microphone that uses a piezoelectric crystal to convert sound energy into electrical energy
  • cultural awareness — Someone's cultural awareness is their understanding of the differences between themselves and people from other countries or other backgrounds, especially differences in attitudes and values.
  • cultural diffusion — act of diffusing; state of being diffused.
  • cultural universal — a cultural pattern extant in every known society.
  • cumbrian mountains — a mountain range in NW England, in Cumbria. Highest peak: Scafell Pike, 977 m (3206 ft)
  • cumulative scoring — a method of scoring in which the score of a partnership is taken as the sum of their scores on all hands played.
  • custodial sentence — a sentence given by a court that involves a term of imprisonment
  • customer relations — Customer relations are the relationships that a business has with its customers and the way in which it treats them.
  • customs and excise — Customs and Excise is a British government department which is responsible for collecting taxes on imported and exported goods. Compare Customs Service.
  • cut-and-waste code — (humour, programming)   Code that someone found online (e.g. in a blog) and copied and pasted into a product. The result is usually a lot of wasted time trying to track down obscure bugs from code that may have made sense in the original context but not in the new one. Also known as blog-driven development.
  • cytoarchitectonics — Cytoarchitecture.
  • dagwood (sandwich) — a thick sandwich with a variety of fillings, often of apparently incompatible foods
  • 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.
  • dangerous offender — an offender who is deemed by a court of law to be likely to engage in further violent conduct, and who thus becomes eligible for an indefinite prison sentence
  • danish west indies — the former possession of Denmark in the W Lesser Antilles, sold to the US in 1917
  • data flow analysis — (programming)   A process to discover the dependencies between different data items manipulated by a program. The order of execution in a data driven language is determined solely by the data dependencies. For example, given the equations 1. X = A + B 2. B = 2 + 2 3. A = 3 + 4 a data-flow analysis would find that 2 and 3 must be evaluated before 1. Since there are no data dependencies between 2 and 3, they may be evaluated in any order, including in parallel. This technique is implemented in hardware in some pipelined processors with multiple functional units. It allows instructions to be executed as soon as their inputs are available, independent of the original program order.
  • data transfer rate — (communications)   (Or "throughput, data rate", "transmission rate") The amount of data transferred in one direction over a link divided by the time taken to transfer it, usually expressed in bits per second (bps), bytes per second (Bps) or baud. The link may be anything from an interface to a hard disk to a radio transmission from a satellite. Where data transfer is not continuous throughout the given time interval, the data transfer rate is thus an average rate that will be lower than the peak rate. The peak or maximum possible rate may itself be lower than the capacity of the communication channel if the channel is shared, or part of the signal is not considered as data, e.g. checksum or routing information. When applied to data rate, the multiplier prefixes "kilo-", "mega-", "giga-", etc. (and their abbreviations, "k", "M", "G", etc.) always denote powers of 1000. For example, 64 kbps is 64,000 bits per second. This contrasts with units of storage where they stand for powers of 1024, e.g. 1 KB = 1024 bytes. The other important characteristic of a channel is its latency. The bandwidth of a channel determines the data transfer rate but is a different characteristic, measured in Hertz. [Relationship?]
  • daytime television — television broadcasts that are shown during the daytime rather than in the evening
  • dead as a doornail — completely dead
  • dead man's fingers — a soft coral, Alcyonium digitatum, with long finger-like polyps
  • dead-man's fingers — any of various fungi, sponges, plant roots, animal parts, etc., having fingerlike projections and a pale or dull color, as the gray-black woodland fungus Xylaria polymorpha or the whitish spongy gills of a food crab.
  • dead-stick landing — Aeronautics, Aerospace. a landing of an airplane or space vehicle with the engine cut off.
  • deanthropomorphism — the ridding of philosophy or religion of anthropomorphic beliefs and doctrines.
  • debt consolidation — the process of taking out a new loan (often secured on one's property) in order to pay off a number of existing debts
  • 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
  • defense calculator — IBM 701
  • deficiency disease — any condition, such as pellagra, beriberi, or scurvy, produced by a lack of vitamins or other essential substances
  • deinstitutionalize — to discharge (a patient) as from a mental institution
  • delmarva peninsula — a peninsula of the northeast US, between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic
  • demand liabilities — the assets of a financial institution that are demandable by depositors
  • 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).
  • departmental store — a department store.
  • desalination plant — a factory where salt is removed from salt water in order to make the water suitable for drinking and irrigation
  • destruct mechanism — a mechanism that causes the destruction of a rocket or missile when activated
  • detective sergeant — a police officer who investigates crime and who ranks above a detective constable but below a detective inspector
  • 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
  • diabetes insipidus — a disorder of the pituitary gland causing excessive thirst and excretion of large quantities of dilute urine
  • diagnostic testing — Diagnostic testing is the testing of a vehicle, or one of its systems or parts, in order to identify why it is not working properly.
  • diaminofluorescein — (organic compound) A fluorescein into which two amino groups have been substituted.
  • didaskaleinophobia — The fear of going to school.
  • dietary supplement — a substance taken in addition to what you eat in order to promote health
  • digital humanities — (used with a singular verb) the study of literature, philosophy, etc., as facilitated by computer technology or digital media: Digital humanities uses data analysis to find patterns in large bodies of text. the set of methodologies used in such scholarship.
  • digital signatures — digital signature
  • digital television — a television broadcasting technology in which signals are transmitted as a sequence of binary numbers.
  • dimensionalisation — Alternative spelling of dimensionalization.
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