16-letter words containing s, i, n, a, t, c
- archaeomagnetism — an archaeological technique for dating certain clay objects by measuring the extent to which they have been magnetized by the earth's magnetic field
- archconservative — consistently holding extremely conservative views: publisher of the city's archconservative newspaper.
- arsenic trioxide — a white poisonous powder used in the manufacture of glass and as an insecticide, rat poison, and weedkiller. Formula: As2O3
- arthus' reaction — a severe, local immune reaction to the injection of an antigen in a sensitized host.
- artistic license — (legal) The open source license applicable to Perl.
- as distinct from — If you say that you are talking about one thing as distinct from another, you are indicating exactly which thing you mean.
- ascending rhythm — rising rhythm.
- ascidian tadpole — the free-swimming larva of an ascidian, having a tadpole-like tail containing the notochord and nerve cord
- asiatic elephant — Indian elephant. See under elephant.
- association area — any of the regions of the cerebral cortex of the brain connected by numerous nerve fibers to all parts of both cerebral hemispheres and coordinating such higher activities as learning and reasoning.
- associationistic — Of or pertaining to associationism.
- athanasian creed — a profession of faith widely used in the Western Church which, although formerly attributed to Athanasius, probably originated in Gaul between 381 and 428 ad
- atomic mass unit — a unit of mass used to express atomic and molecular weights that is equal to one twelfth of the mass of an atom of carbon-12. It is equivalent to 1.66 × 10–27 kg
- atwood's machine — a device consisting of two unequal masses connected by a string passed over a pulley, used to illustrate the laws of motion.
- australian crawl — a stroke in which the feet are kicked like paddles while the arms reach forward and pull back through the water
- axminster carpet — a type of patterned carpet with a cut pile
- bare necessities — only the essentials
- bastard culverin — a 16th-century cannon, smaller than a culverin, firing a shot of between 5 and 8 pounds (11 and 17.6 kg).
- batch processing — manufacturing products or treating materials in batches, by passing the output of one process to subsequent processes
- batesian mimicry — mimicry in which a harmless species is protected from predators by means of its resemblance to a harmful or inedible species
- be of assistance — Someone or something that is of assistance to you is helpful or useful to you.
- bearish tendency — a tendency for share prices to fall
- beta abstraction — [lambda-calculus] The conversion of an expression to an application of a lambda abstraction to an argument expression. Some subterm of the original expression becomes the argument of the abstraction and the rest becomes its body. E.g. 4+1 --> (\ x . x+1) 4 The opposite of beta abstraction is beta reduction. These are the two kinds of beta conversion.
- bicapitalisation — The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as PostScript, NeXT, NeWS, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalisation. Too many marketroid types think this sort of thing is really cute, even the 2,317th time they do it. Compare studlycaps.
- black nightshade — a poisonous solanaceous plant, Solanum nigrum, a common weed in cultivated land, having small white flowers with backward-curved petals and black berry-like fruits
- boston cream pie — a cake of two layers with icing and a creamy filling
- bragg scattering — the diffraction phenomenon exhibited by a crystal bombarded with x-rays in such a way that each plane of the crystal lattice acts as a reflector (Bragg reflector)
- braking distance — the distance a vehicle travels from the point at which its brakes are applied to the point at which it comes to a stop
- branchiopneustic — breathing by means of gills, as certain aquatic insect larvae.
- breast screening — a radiological or other examination of a woman's breasts to check for signs of cancer
- bronchial asthma — asthma.
- bullying tactics — the use of intimidation to gain one's objective
- business account — a bank account or type of bank account used for business transactions rather than personal ones
- cabinet minister — a minister who is a member of the cabinet
- cable television — Cable television is a television system in which signals are sent along wires rather than by radio waves.
- cache on a stick — (architecture) (COAST) Intel Corporation attempt to's standardise the modular L2 cache subsystem in Pentium-based computers. A COAST module should be about 4.35" wide by 1.14" high. According to earlier specifications from Motorola, a module between 4.33" and 4.36" wide, and between 1.12" and 1.16" high is within the COAST standard. Some module vendors, including some major motherboard suppliers, greatly violate the height specification. Another COAST specification violated by many suppliers concerns clock distribution in synchronous modules. The specification requires that the clock tree to each synchronous chip be balanced, i.e. equal length from edge of the connector to individual chips. An unbalanced clock tree increases reflections and noise. For a 256 kilobyte cache module the standard requires the same clock be used for both chips but some vendors use separate clocks to reduce loading on the clock driver and hence increase the clock speed. However, this creates unbalanced loading in other motherboard configurations, such as motherboards with soldered caches in the system.
- calcium arsenate — a toxic, white powder, Ca3(AsO4)2, used as an insecticide in the form of a spray or dust
- call in question — a sentence in an interrogative form, addressed to someone in order to get information in reply.
- canaries current — an ocean current of the North Atlantic flowing southward past Spain and North Africa.
- canine distemper — distemper1 (def 1a).
- capital sentence — the punishment of death for a crime
- capsizing moment — the moment of an upsetting couple.
- cardinal virtues — the most important moral qualities, traditionally justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude
- carrot and stick — If an organization has a carrot and stick approach or policy, they offer people things in order to persuade them to do something and punish them if they refuse to do it.
- case insensitive — case sensitivity
- case sensitivity — (text) Whether a text matching operation distinguishes upper-case (capital) letters from lower case (is "case sensitive") or not ("case insensitive"). Case in file names should be preserved (for readability) but ignored when matching (so the user doesn't have to get it right). MS-DOS does not preserve case in file names, Unix preserves case and matches are case sensitive. Any decent text editor will allow the user to specify whether or not text searches should be case sensitive. Case sensitivity is also relevant in programming (most programming languages distiguish between case in the names of identifiers), and addressing (Internet domain names are case insensitive but RFC 822 local mailbox names are case sensitive). Case insensitive operations are sometimes said to "fold case", from the idea of folding the character code table so that upper and lower case letters coincide. The alternative "smash case" is more likely to be used by someone who considers this behaviour a misfeature or in cases where one case is actually permanently converted to the other. "MS-DOS will automatically smash case in the names of all the files you create".
- cash transaction — a piece of business, for example an act of buying or selling something
- casting director — the person in charge of choosing of actors for a production
- castor-oil plant — a tall euphorbiaceous Indian plant, Ricinus communis, cultivated in tropical regions for ornament and for its poisonous seeds, from which castor oil is extracted
- cataractogenesis — The formation of a cataract.