24-letter words containing t, s, o
- responsibility allowance — payment made to somebody who has special responsibilities
- reverse annuity mortgage — a type of home mortgage under which an elderly homeowner is allowed a long-term loan in the form of monthly payments against his or her paid-off equity as collateral, repayable when the home is eventually sold. Abbreviation: RAM.
- revised standard version — a revision of the Bible, based on the American Standard Version and the King James Version, prepared by American scholars, published in its completed form in 1952. Abbreviation: RSV.
- robot exclusion standard — standard for robot exclusion
- rocky mountain whitefish — mountain whitefish.
- rose-coloured spectacles — If you look at a person or situation through rose-coloured glasses or rose-tinted glasses, you see only their good points and therefore your view of them is unrealistic. In British English, you can also say that someone is looking through rose-coloured spectacles.
- rub someone's nose in it — to remind someone unkindly of his or her failing or error
- saint ignatius of loyola — Saint Ignatius of (Iñigo López de Loyola) 1491–1556, Spanish soldier and ecclesiastic: founder of the Society of Jesus.
- san bernardino mountains — mountain range in S Calif., south of the Mojave Desert: highest peak, 11,502 ft (3,506 m)
- santa coloma de gramanet — a city in NE Spain.
- scalable vector graphics — (graphics, web) A W3C standard for vector graphics, based on XML.
- schizoaffective disorder — a psychotic disorder in which symptoms of schizophrenia and affective disorder occur simultaneously.
- scholastic aptitude test — a standard assessment test for entry into college in the United States
- scottish country dancing — a type of Scottish folk dancing, including reels, jigs, and strathspeys, in which couples are arranged in sets and perform a series of movements, esp facing one another in a line
- secondary school teacher — a person who teaches at a secondary school
- see someone hanged first — to refuse absolutely to do what one has been asked
- senegambia confederation — an economic and political union (1982–89) between Senegal and The Gambia
- sequentially compact set — a set in which every sequence has a subsequence that converges to a point of the set.
- serial interface adaptor — (SIA) The Ethernet driver chip used on a Filtabyte Ethernet card.
- set one's house in order — to put one's affairs in order
- set the wheels in motion — If someone sets the wheels in motion, they take the necessary action to make something start happening.
- shadow foreign secretary — the member of the main opposition party in Parliament who would hold the office of Foreign Secretary if their party were in power
- shenandoah national park — a national park in N Virginia, including part of the Blue Ridge mountain range. 302 sq. mi. (782 sq. km).
- short-horned grasshopper — locust (def 1).
- show one's (true) colors — to reveal one's true self
- sic transit gloria mundi — thus passes the glory of the world
- sign one's death warrant — to cause one's own destruction
- simultaneous translation — a form of translation in which the interpreter translates into the target language as quickly as possible while the speaker is still speaking in the source language
- single connection attach — (hardware) (SCA, "Single Connector Attachment") A non-standard type of SCSI connector, used mostly by OEMs, which carries both power and data on one 80-pin connector. SCA SCSI drives tend to be cheaper but use with standard SCSI cables requires an adaptor and external termination.
- single person supplement — an additional sum of money that a hotel charges for one person to stay in a room meant for two people
- single transferable vote — of or relating to a system of voting in which voters list the candidates in order of preference. Any candidate achieving a predetermined proportion of the votes in a constituency is elected. Votes exceeding this amount and those cast for the bottom candidate are redistributed according to the stated preferences. Redistribution continues until all the seats are filled
- six nations championship — the annual competition involving national sides representing England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland, and Wales. Until the admission of Italy in 2000, it was known as the Five Nations Championship
- skeleton in the cupboard — a scandalous fact or event in the past that is kept secret
- slop oil recovery system — A slop oil recovery system is a method and the equipment used for cleaning and disposing of mixtures of oil, chemicals, and water from various sources in a refinery or oilfield.
- socialist workers' party — one of the biggest extreme left wing parties in Britain
- sodium hexametaphosphate — See under Calgon.
- solution based modelling — (SBM) A software development process described in the book "Developing Object-Oriented Software for the Macintosh" written by Neal Goldstein and Jeff Alger, published by Addison Wesley in 1992.
- sorrows of young werther — German Die Leiden des Jungen Werther. a romantic novel (1774) in epistolary form by Goethe.
- south equatorial current — an ocean current, flowing westward, found near the equator in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.
- southern british english — the dialect of spoken English regarded as standard in England and considered as having high social status in comparison with other British English dialects. Historically, it is derived from the S East Midland dialect of Middle English
- southern cornstalk borer — the larva of a grass moth, Diatraea crambidoides, occurring in the southeastern U.S. from Maryland to Georgia, that is sometimes a serious pest, especially of corn.
- special checking account — a checking account that requires no minimum balance but in which a small charge is made for each check issued or drawn and for monthly maintenance.
- special development area — an area earmarked for special development by the government
- st.-bruno-de-montarville — a town in S Quebec, in E Canada, near Montreal.
- stab someone in the back — If you say that someone has stabbed you in the back, you mean that they have done something very harmful to you when you thought that you could trust them. You can refer to an action of this kind as a stab in the back.
- stand in one's own light — to harm one's reputation by acting unwisely
- standard housing benefit — a rebate of a proportion of a person's eligible housing costs paid by a local authority and calculated on the basis of level of income and family size
- stereographic projection — a one-to-one correspondence between the points on a sphere and the extended complex plane where the north pole on the sphere corresponds to the point at infinity of the plane.
- sth bodes ill/augurs ill — If something bodes ill or augurs ill, it gives you a reason to fear that something harmful might happen soon.
- stratificational grammar — a grammar based upon the theory that language is made up of successive strata that are interconnected by established rules.