16-letter words containing w
- consumption weed — groundsel tree.
- continuous waves — radio waves generated as a continuous train of oscillations having a constant frequency and amplitude
- corkscrew flower — snailflower.
- corporate lawyer — a lawyer who works for a corporation
- counselor-at-law — a lawyer, esp one who conducts cases in court; attorney
- counterclockwise — If something is moving counterclockwise, it is moving in the opposite direction to the direction in which the hands of a clock move.
- coursewriter iii — (language, education) A simple CAI language, developed around 1976.
- cowichan sweater — a heavy sweater of grey, unbleached wool with distinctive designs that were originally black-and-white but are now sometimes coloured: knitted originally by Cowichan Indians in British Columbia
- creative writing — Creative writing is writing such as novels, stories, poems, and plays.
- creditworthiness — having a satisfactory credit rating.
- cromwell current — an equatorial Pacific current, flowing eastward from the Hawaiian Islands to the Galápagos Islands
- crossbow archery — the sport of shooting with a crossbow
- crossword puzzle — a puzzle in which the solver deduces words suggested by numbered clues and writes them into corresponding boxes in a grid to form a vertical and horizontal pattern
- crowd one's luck — to take unnecessary risks in an already favorable situation
- crown and anchor — a game played with dice marked with crowns and anchors
- crown prosecutor — In Britain, a crown prosecutor is a lawyer who works for the state and who prosecutes people who are accused of crimes.
- curlew sandpiper — a common Eurasian sandpiper, Calidris ferruginea, having a brick-red breeding plumage and a greyish winter plumage
- curtain-twitcher — a person who likes to watch unobserved what other people are doing
- cut a wide swath — to make an ostentatious display or forceful impression
- cut and blow-dry — a hairdressing procedure in which the customer's hair is cut and blow-dried
- cut down to size — to reduce the prestige or importance of
- dabrowa gornicza — an industrial city in S Poland.
- dafydd ap gwilym — ?1320–?1380, Welsh poet
- dagwood sandwich — a thick sandwich filled with a variety of meats, cheeses, dressings, and condiments.
- darwin's finches — the finches of the subfamily Geospizinae of the Galapagos Islands, showing great variation in bill structure and feeding habits: provided Darwin with evidence to support his theory of evolution
- darwinian theory — Darwin's theory of evolution, which holds that all species of plants and animals developed from earlier forms by hereditary transmission of slight variations in successive generations, and that natural selection determines which forms will survive
- data warehousing — the use of large amounts of data taken from multiple sources to create reports and for data analysis
- de broglie waves — the set of waves that represent the behaviour of an elementary particle, or some atoms and molecules, under certain conditions. The de Broglie wavelength, λ, is given by λ = h/mv, where h is the Planck constant, m the mass, and v the velocity of the particle
- de morgan's laws — (in formal logic and set theory) the principles that conjunction and disjunction, or union and intersection, are dual. Thus the negation of P & Q is equivalent to not-P or not-Q
- dead man walking — a condemned man walking from his prison cell to a place of execution
- declare war (on) — to make a formal declaration of being at war (with)
- developing world — Third World: poor countries
- development well — (in the oil industry) a well drilled for the production of oil or gas from a field already proven by appraisal drilling to be suitable for exploitation
- dew-point spread — the degrees of difference between the air temperature and the dew point
- dick whittington — Richard ("Dick") 1358?–1423, English merchant and philanthropist: Lord Mayor of London 1398, 1406–07, 1419–20.
- dispersive power — a measure of the ability of a substance to disperse light, equal to the quotient of the difference in refractive indices of the substance for two representative wavelengths divided by the difference of the refractive index for an intermediate wavelength and 1.
- distributive law — a theorem asserting that one operator can validly be distributed over another
- do business with — trade or deal with
- down at the heel — with the heels of one's shoes in need of repair
- down memory lane — If you say that someone is taking a walk or trip down memory lane, you mean that they are talking, writing, or thinking about something that happened to them a long time ago.
- down one's alley — a passage, as through a continuous row of houses, permitting access from the street to backyards, garages, etc.
- down to the wire — a slender, stringlike piece or filament of relatively rigid or flexible metal, usually circular in section, manufactured in a great variety of diameters and metals depending on its application.
- downy woodpecker — a small, North American woodpecker, Picoides pubescens, having black and white plumage.
- draw and quarter — to disembowel and dismember (a person) after hanging
- draw the longbow — to exaggerate in telling something
- dree one's weird — to endure one's fate
- drop (down) dead — If you say that a person or animal dropped dead or dropped down dead, you mean that they died very suddenly and unexpectedly.
- drugstore cowboy — a young man who loafs around drugstores or on street corners.
- dual carriageway — divided highway.
- dublin bay prawn — a large prawn usually used in a dish of scampi