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18-letter words containing s, o, n, a, d

  • cot death syndrome — the unexplained sudden death of an infant during sleep
  • couldn't care less — If you say that you couldn't care less about someone or something, you are emphasizing that you are not interested in them or worried about them. In American English, you can also say that you could care less, with the same meaning.
  • countryside agency — (in England) a government agency that promotes the conservation and enjoyment of the countryside and aims to stimulate employment in rural areas
  • cross-disciplinary — linking two or more fields of study
  • cultural diffusion — act of diffusing; state of being diffused.
  • custodial sentence — a sentence given by a court that involves a term of imprisonment
  • 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.
  • dagwood (sandwich) — a thick sandwich with a variety of fillings, often of apparently incompatible foods
  • 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
  • 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.
  • daytime television — television broadcasts that are shown during the daytime rather than in the evening
  • dead as a doornail — completely dead
  • 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.
  • defense calculator — IBM 701
  • deinstitutionalize — to discharge (a patient) as from a mental institution
  • 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
  • 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.
  • digital television — a television broadcasting technology in which signals are transmitted as a sequence of binary numbers.
  • dimensionalisation — Alternative spelling of dimensionalization.
  • dimensionalization — The process of dimensionalizing.
  • directional signal — any of four signal lights on the front left, front right, rear left, and rear right of an automotive vehicle that, when actuated by the driver, flash in pairs on the side toward which a turn is to be made.
  • disability pension — a pension paid to people who are unable to continue to work because of a disability
  • discourse analysis — the study of the rules or patterns characterizing units of connected speech or writing longer than a sentence.
  • disidentifications — Plural form of disidentification.
  • dispatch documents — documents sent with a parcel, etc, detailing information such as contents, delivery address, etc
  • disproportionality — not in proportion; disproportionate.
  • disproportionately — not proportionate; out of proportion, as in size or number.
  • disproportionation — the simultaneous oxidation and reduction of a substance reacting with itself, thereby forming two dissimilar molecules, as 2C 2 H 4 →C 2 H 6 +C 2 H 2 .
  • distance education — education in which students receive instruction over the Internet, from a video, etc., instead of going to school.
  • distribution class — form class
  • distribution ratio — the ratio of concentrations of a solute distributed between two immiscible solvents in contact with each other, as iodine in water and chloroform
  • divine inspiration — insight provided by higher power
  • division algorithm — the theorem that an integer can be written as the sum of the product of two integers, one a given positive integer, added to a positive integer smaller than the given positive integer. Compare Euclidean algorithm.
  • division of labour — a system of organizing the manufacture of an article in a series of separate specialized operations, each of which is carried out by a different worker or group of workers
  • domain name server — (spelling)   Domain Name System.
  • domain name system — (networking)   (DNS) A general-purpose distributed, replicated, data query service chiefly used on Internet for translating hostnames into Internet addresses. Also, the style of hostname used on the Internet, though such a name is properly called a fully qualified domain name. DNS can be configured to use a sequence of name servers, based on the domains in the name being looked for, until a match is found. The name resolution client (e.g. Unix's gethostbyname() library function) can be configured to search for host information in the following order: first in the local hosts file, second in NIS and third in DNS. This sequencing of Naming Services is sometimes called "name service switching". Under Solaris is configured in the file /etc/nsswitch.conf. DNS can be queried interactively using the command nslookup. It is defined in STD 13, RFC 1034, RFC 1035, RFC 1591.
  • domestic appliance — a machine used for household tasks, for example, a washing machine, refrigerator, etc.
  • donor insemination — a process which involves using sperm which has been voluntarily given for use in the insemination of another person
  • drainpipe trousers — trousers with very narrow legs
  • driver's education — high-school driving classes
  • dwarf storage unit — (humour)   (DSU) An IBM term for a cupboard.
  • dynamic psychology — any system of psychology that emphasizes the interaction between different motives, emotions, and drives
  • dynamically scoped — dynamic scope
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