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20-letter words containing s, e, n, a, t, o

  • 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
  • compensatory damages — sum paid for a loss
  • complaints procedure — a prescribed method of lodging a complaint to an institution
  • complementary angles — either of two angles that added together produce an angle of 90°.
  • complementary colors — any of two colors of the spectrum that, combined in the right intensities, produce white or nearly white light
  • complementary strand — either of the two chains that make up a double helix of DNA, with corresponding positions on the two chains being composed of a pair of complementary bases.
  • condensation nucleus — nucleus (def 5).
  • confectioners' sugar — Confectioners' sugar is very fine white sugar that is used for making icing and candy.
  • congressman-at-large — (in the US) a member of the House of Representatives who was elected by the voters of an entire state as opposed to the voters of a single Congressional district
  • 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
  • constant de rebecque — Henri Benjamin [ahn-ree ban-zha-man] /ɑ̃ˈri bɛ̃ ʒaˈmɛ̃/ (Show IPA), (Benjamin Constant) 1767–1830, French statesman and author, born in Switzerland.
  • constituent assembly — A constituent assembly is a body of representatives that is elected to create or change their country's constitution.
  • 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)
  • controlled substance — a drug regulated by the Federal Controlled Substances Acts, including opiates, depressants, stimulants, and hallucinogens
  • 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
  • copulative asyndeton — a staccato effect produced by omitting copulative connectives between two or more items in a group, as in “Friends, Romans, countrymen.”.
  • counterdemonstration — a demonstration that is held in reaction to another demonstration
  • craniosacral therapy — a form of therapy for various disorders in which the therapist manipulates the bones of the skull
  • cross someone's path — to meet or thwart someone
  • cut one's own throat — to be the means of one's own ruin
  • cytosine arabinoside — cytarabine.
  • database transaction — (database)   A set of related changes applied to a database. The term typically implies that either all of the changes should be applied or, in the event of an error, none of them, i.e. the transaction should be atomic. Atomicity is one of the ACID properties a transaction can have, another is isolation - preventing interference between processes trying to access the database cocurrently. This is usually achieved by some form of locking - where one process takes exclusive control of a database table or row for the duration of the transaction, preventing other processes from accessing the locked data. The canonical example of a transaction is transferring money between two bank accounts by subtracting it from one and adding it to the other. Some relational database management systems require the user to explicitly start a transaction and then either commit it (if all the individual steps are successful) or roll it back (if there are any errors).
  • de facto segregation — racial, ethnic, or other segregation resulting from societal differences between groups, as socioeconomic or political disparity, without institutionalized legislation intended to segregate.
  • defense data network — (DDN) A global communications network serving the US Department of Defense. Composed of MILNET, other portions of the Internet, and classified networks which are not part of the Internet. The DDN is used to connect military installations and is managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency.
  • deinstitutionalizing — Present participle of deinstitutionalize.
  • deontological ethics — the branch of ethics dealing with right action and the nature of duty, without regard to the goodness or value of motives or the desirability of the ends of any act.
  • depreciation expense — A depreciation expense is the amount deducted from gross profit to allow for a reduction in the value of something because of its age or how much it has been used.
  • descriptive notation — a method of denoting the squares on the chessboard in which each player names the files from the pieces that stand on them at the opening and numbers the ranks away from himself
  • desmopressin acetate — a vasopressin analogue, C 46 H 64 N 14 O 12 S 2 , used in the treatment of diabetes insipidus.
  • diammonium phosphate — a white, crystalline, water-soluble compound, (NH 4) 2 HPO 4 , used as fertilizer, in fire extinguishers, etc.
  • dickless workstation — (abuse)   Extremely pejorative hackerism for "diskless workstation".
  • diels-alder reaction — the reaction in which a conjugated diene combines with a double or triple bond of a given compound to form a ring of six carbon atoms.
  • differential housing — the casing that houses the differential of a motor vehicle
  • diophantine analysis — any of several methods for finding integral solutions for equations with more than one variable whose coefficients are integers.
  • directory assistance — a telephone company service that furnishes telephone directory information over the telephone.
  • directory user agent — (DUA) The software that accesses the X.500 Directory Service on behalf of the directory user. The directory user may be a person or another software element.
  • disability allowance — an amount of money paid by the government to people who are unable to work because of a disability. This is a general term or, in the UK, a shorter way of referring to what is officially called the Disability Living Allowance
  • discounted cash flow — a technique for appraising an investment that takes into account the different values of future returns according to when they will be received
  • discretionary income — money for luxuries
  • diskless workstation — (computer, networking)   A personal computer or workstation which has neither a hard disk nor floppy disk drive and which performs all file access via a local area network connection to a file server. The lowest level bootstrap code is stored in non-volatile storage. This uses a simple protocol such as BOOTP to request and download more sophisticated boot code and eventually, the operating system. The archtypal product was the 3Station developed by Bob Metcalfe at 3Com. Another example was the Sun 3/50. Diskless workstations are ideal when many users are running the same application. They are small, quiet, more reliable than products with disks, and help prevent both the theft of data and the introduction of viruses since the software and data available on them is controlled by the network administrator or system administrator. They do however rely on a server which becomes a disadvantage if it is heavily loaded or down. See also breath-of-life packet.
  • displacement tonnage — the number of long tons of water displaced by a vessel, light or load displacement being specified.
  • disproportionateness — The state or quality of being disproportionate or out of proportion.
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