0%

18-letter words containing w

  • chinese water deer — a small Chinese or Korean deer, Hydropotes inermis, having tusks and no antlers: introduced into England and France
  • chinese watermelon — a tropical Asian vine, Benincasa hispida, of the gourd family, having a brown, hairy stem, large, solitary, yellow flowers, and white, melonlike fruit.
  • chuck-will's-widow — a large North American nightjar, Caprimulgus carolinensis, similar to the whippoorwill
  • claw-and-ball foot — ball-and-claw foot.
  • clean as a whistle — If you describe something as clean as a whistle, you mean that it is completely clean.
  • clew down (or up) — to lower (or raise) a sail by means of clew lines
  • clothing allowance — an amount of money to compensate for the purchase of clothes for work, school, etc
  • coals to newcastle — If someone is taking coals to Newcastle, they are trying to give or sell someone something that they already have a lot of.
  • come down the pike — When something comes down the pike, it happens or occurs.
  • come someone's way — to come within someone's scope or range; come to someone
  • come the raw prawn — to attempt deception
  • come to grips with — If you come to grips with a problem, you consider it seriously, and start taking action to deal with it.
  • come to light with — to find or produce
  • come to terms with — If you come to terms with something difficult or unpleasant, you learn to accept and deal with it.
  • common wintergreen — a plant (Pyrola minor) of temperate and arctic regions, having rounded leaves and small pink globose flowers: family Pyrolaceae
  • common-law husband — a man considered to be a woman's husband after the couple have cohabited for several years
  • commonwealth games — an event held every four years in which sportspeople from the countries of the Commonwealth compete
  • compensation award — an amount of money awarded as compensation in a court case
  • conductivity water — water that has a conductivity of less than 0.043 × 10–6 S cm–1
  • constitutional law — the body of law that evolves from a constitution, setting out the fundamental principles according to which a state is governed and defining the relationship between the various branches of government within the state.
  • corridors of power — the higher echelons of government, the Civil Service, etc, considered as the location of power and influence
  • crested wheatgrass — a forage grass, Agropyron cristatum, native to Eurasia and grown in the Great Plains as pasturage, hay, and for erosion control.
  • crown-jewel option — an option given by a company subjected to an unwelcome takeover bid to a friendly firm, allowing this firm to buy one or more of its best businesses if the bid succeeds
  • cultural awareness — Someone's cultural awareness is their understanding of the differences between themselves and people from other countries or other backgrounds, especially differences in attitudes and values.
  • 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
  • daisywheel printer — (printer)   A kind of impact printer where the characters are arranged on the ends of the spokes of a wheel (resembling the petals on a daisy). The wheel (usually made of plastic) is rotated to select the character to print and then an electrically operated hammer mechanism bends the selected spoke forward slightly, sandwiching an ink ribbon between the character and the paper, as in a typewriter. One advantage of this arrangement over that of a typewriter is that different wheels may be inserted to produce different typefaces.
  • danish west indies — the former possession of Denmark in the W Lesser Antilles, sold to the US in 1917
  • 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.
  • deadweight tonnage — the capacity in long tons of cargo, passengers, fuel, stores, etc. (deadweight tons) of a vessel: the difference between the loaded and light displacement tonnage of the vessel.
  • declaration of war — a formal statement made by one country to another that a state of war now exists between them
  • delaware water gap — a gorge on the boundary between E Pennsylvania and NW New Jersey.
  • determinate growth — growth of a plant stem that is terminated early by the formation of a bud
  • digital switchover — the process of changing the method of transmitting television from analogue to digital format
  • dishwashing liquid — Dishwashing liquid is a thick soapy liquid which you add to hot water to clean dirty dishes.
  • do one's own thing — a material object without life or consciousness; an inanimate object.
  • don't get me wrong — You say 'Don't get me wrong' when you want to make sure that someone does not get an incorrect idea about what you are doing or saying, or about why you are doing or saying it.
  • double white lines — parallel white lines on a roadway, usually indicating a barrier to crossing
  • double-edged sword — sth that can be both positive and negative
  • down on one's luck — the force that seems to operate for good or ill in a person's life, as in shaping circumstances, events, or opportunities: With my luck I'll probably get pneumonia.
  • down to the ground — thoroughly; completely
  • dry-powder inhaler — A dry-powder inhaler is a device that delivers medication to the lungs in the form of a dry powder.
  • due process of law — the administration of justice in accordance with established rules and principles
  • dwarf storage unit — (humour)   (DSU) An IBM term for a cupboard.
  • east indian walnut — lebbek.
  • eastern meadowlark — any of several American songbirds of the genus Sturnella, of the family Icteridae, especially S. magna (eastern meadowlark) and S. neglecta (western meadowlark) having a brownish and black back and wings and a yellow breast, noted for their clear, tuneful song.
  • eighty-twenty rule — (programming)   The program-design version of the law of diminishing returns. The 80/20 rule says that roughly 80% of the problem can be solved with 20% of the effort that it would take to solve the whole problem. For example, parsing e-mail addresses in "From:" lines in e-mail messages is notoriously difficult if you follow the RFC 2822 specification. However, about 60% of actual "From:" lines are in the format "From: Their Name <[email protected]>", with a far more constrained idea of what can be in "user" or "host" than in RFC 2822. Another 25% just add double-quotes around "Their Name". Matching just those two patterns would thus cover 85% of "From:" lines, with a tiny portion of the code required to fully implement RFC2822. (Adding support for "From: [email protected]" and "From: [email protected] (Their Name) " brings coverage to almost 100%, leaving only really baroque things that RFC-2822 permits, like "From: Pete(A wonderful \) chap)
  • electronic warfare — the military use of electronics to prevent or reduce an enemy's effective use and to protect friendly use of electromagnetic radiation equipment
  • endowment mortgage — an arrangement whereby a person takes out a mortgage and pays the capital repayment instalments into a life assurance policy and only the interest to the mortgagee during the term of the policy. The loan is repaid by the policy either when it matures or on the prior death of the policyholder
  • epicycloidal wheel — one of the planetary gears of an epicyclic train
Was this page helpful?
Yes No
Thank you for your feedback! Tell your friends about this page
Tell us why?