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20-letter words containing s, e, i, t

  • child-abuse register — (in Britain) a list of children deemed to be at risk of abuse or injury from their parents or guardians, compiled and held by a local authority, area health authority, or NSPCC Special Unit
  • childhood sweetheart — a boyfriend or girlfriend from an early stage of life
  • chinese scholar tree — a spreading, round-headed tree, Sophora japonica, of the legume family, native to China and Korea, having yellowish-white flowers in loose, showy clusters, grown widely as a street tree.
  • chips & technologies — (company)   A former leading distributor and supplier of integrated circuits and software to personal computer manufacturers. As well as semiconductors they also made flat panel displays, video controllers and other computer related products. In 1998, Intel Corporation bought Chips and Technologies for their flat panel controllers. In January 2000, Asiliant Technologies licensed the rights from Intel to continue to manufacturer and sell Chips and Technologies components. Address: 2950 Zanker Road, San Jose, California 95134, USA.
  • cholestyramine resin — a powdery synthetic resin that binds with and prevents the reabsorption of bile acids, used to reduce cholesterol levels, relieve itching associated with jaundice, etc.
  • christopher columbus — Christopher (Sp. Cristóbal Colón; It. Cristoforo Colombo) 1446?–1506, Italian navigator in Spanish service: traditionally considered the discoverer of America 1492.
  • christopher strachey — (person)   Professor of Computation at Oxford, England, born 1916, died May 1975. He invented the term "currying". See also: General Purpose Macro-generator.
  • clay-pigeon shooting — the activity of shooting clay pigeons
  • cleansing department — the department of a local authority that collects refuse
  • climbing bittersweet — bittersweet (def 4).
  • climbing-bittersweet — Also called woody nightshade. a climbing or trailing plant, Solanum dulcamara, of the nightshade family, having small, violet, star-shaped flowers with a protruding yellow center and scarlet berries.
  • co-operative society — In Britain, a co-operative society is a commercial organization with several shops in a particular district. Customers can join this organization and get a share of its profits.
  • cocktail shaker sort — (algorithm)   A bi-directional bubble sort. Passes alternate between ascending through array indexes, pushing the largest item to the bottom; and descending through array indexes, pushing the smallest item to the top.
  • cognitive dissonance — an uncomfortable mental state resulting from conflicting cognitions; usually resolved by changing some of the cognitions
  • cognitive psychology — the psychological study of higher mental processes, including thinking and perception
  • collective ownership — ownership by a group for the benefit of members of that group
  • collegiate institute — (in certain provinces) a large secondary school with an academic, rather than vocational, emphasis
  • come out in the wash — If you say that something will come out in the wash, you mean that people will eventually find out the truth about it.
  • commissioning editor — a person who commissions authors to write books and magazine articles
  • commonwealth hackish — (jargon)   Hacker jargon as spoken outside the US, especially in the British Commonwealth. It is reported that Commonwealth speakers are more likely to pronounce truncations like "char" and "soc", etc., as spelled (/char/, /sok/), as opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in newsgroup names (especially two-component names) tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot wib'l/ rather than /sohsh wib'l/). The prefix meta may be pronounced /mee't*/; similarly, Greek letter beta is usually /bee't*/, zeta is usually /zee't*/, and so forth. Preferred metasyntactic variables include blurgle, "eek", "ook", "frodo", and "bilbo"; "wibble", "wobble", and in emergencies "wubble"; "banana", "tom", "dick", "harry", "wombat", "frog", fish, and so on and on (see foo). Alternatives to verb doubling include suffixes "-o-rama", "frenzy" (as in feeding frenzy), and "city" (examples: "barf city!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump frenzy!"). Finally, note that the American terms "parens", "brackets", and "braces" for (), [], and {} are uncommon; Commonwealth hackish prefers "brackets", "square brackets", and "curly brackets". Also, the use of "pling" for bang is common outside the United States. See also attoparsec, calculator, chemist, console jockey, fish, go-faster stripes, grunge, hakspek, heavy metal, leaky heap, lord high fixer, loose bytes, muddie, nadger, noddy, psychedelicware, plingnet, raster blaster, RTBM, seggie, spod, sun lounge, terminal junkie, tick-list features, weeble, weasel, YABA, and notes or definitions under Bad Thing, barf, bum, chase pointers, cosmic rays, crippleware, crunch, dodgy, gonk, hamster, hardwarily, mess-dos, nibble, proglet, root, SEX, tweak and xyzzy.
  • commune with oneself — to think; ponder
  • communication system — (communications)   A system or facility for transfering data between persons and equipment. The system usually consists of a collection of individual communication networks, transmission systems, relay stations, tributary stations and terminal equipment capable of interconnection and interoperation so as to form an integrated whole. These individual components must serve a common purpose, be technically compatible, employ common procedures, respond to some form of control and generally operate in unison.
  • compartmentalisation — Alternative form of compartmentalization.
  • compensating balance — Also, compensated balance, compensation balance. a balance wheel in a timepiece, designed to compensate for variations in tension in the hair spring caused by changes in temperature.
  • compensation culture — a culture in which people are very ready to go to law over even relatively minor incidents in the hope of gaining compensation
  • compensation package — the sum of compensation awarded in a legal case
  • complaints procedure — a prescribed method of lodging a complaint to an institution
  • composite photograph — a photograph formed by superimposing two or more separate photographs
  • compression ignition — ignition of engine fuel by the heat of air compressed in the cylinders into which the fuel is introduced.
  • computer typesetting — a system for the high-speed composition of type by a device driven by punched paper tape or magnetic tape that has been processed by a computer
  • condensation nucleus — nucleus (def 5).
  • conditioned response — a response that is transferred from the second to the first of a pair of stimuli. A well-known Pavlovian example is salivation by a dog when it hears a bell ring, because food has always been presented when the bell has been rung previously
  • conditioned stimulus — a stimulus to which an organism has learned to make a response by classical conditioning
  • confectioners' sugar — Confectioners' sugar is very fine white sugar that is used for making icing and candy.
  • conflict of interest — a conflict between one's obligation to the public good and one's self-interest, as in the case of a public officeholder who owns stock in a company seeking government contracts
  • connector conspiracy — (business, standard)   The tendency of manufacturers (or, by extension, other designers) to come up with products that don't fit with the old stuff, thereby making you buy either all new stuff or expensive interface devices. The term probably came into prominence with the appearance of the DEC KL-10, none of whose connectors matched anything else. The KL-10 Massbus connector was actually *patented* by DEC, who reputedly refused to licence the design, thus effectively locking out competition for the lucrative Massbus peripherals market. This policy was a source of frustration for the owners of dying, obsolescent disk and tape drives. A related phenomenon is the invention of new screw heads so that only Designated Persons, possessing the magic screwdrivers, can remove covers and make repairs or install options. Older Apple Macintoshes took this one step further, requiring not only a hex wrench but a specialised case-cracking tool to open the box. With the advent of more open-systems computing this term has fallen somewhat into disuse. Compare backward combatability.
  • conservation of mass — the principle that the total mass of any isolated system is constant and is independent of any chemical and physical changes taking place within the system
  • conservative baptist — a member of a Protestant denomination (Conservative Baptist Association of America) organized in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1948.
  • conservative judaism — a movement reacting against the radicalism of Reform Judaism, rejecting extreme change and advocating moderate relaxations of traditional Jewish law, by an extension of the process by which its adherents claim traditional Orthodox Judaism evolved
  • constituent assembly — A constituent assembly is a body of representatives that is elected to create or change their country's constitution.
  • consumer electronics — computers and other electronic devices designed for private individuals as opposed to businesses
  • contact metamorphism — localized metamorphism resulting from the heat of an igneous intrusion.
  • context of situation — the totality of extralinguistic features having relevance to a communicative act.
  • continental congress — the assembly of delegates from the North American rebel colonies held during and after the War of American Independence. It issued the Declaration of Independence (1776) and framed the Articles of Confederation (1777)
  • continuum hypothesis — the assertion that there is no set whose cardinality is greater than that of the integers and smaller than that of the reals
  • controlled explosion — the deliberate detonation of an explosive device under strictly controlled circumstances
  • controlling interest — a quantity of shares in a business that is sufficient to ensure control over its direction
  • convective discharge — the repulsion of ions of a gas by a highly charged body, creating a discernible wind.
  • conventional weapons — weapons which are not nuclear
  • conversation stopper — a comment that is so shocking or boring that people stop talking
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