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21-letter words containing l, o, u

  • buffalo carpet beetle — any of several small beetles of the family Dermestidae, the larvae of which are household pests, feeding on rugs and other woolen fabrics, especially Anthrenus scrophulariae (buffalo carpet beetle) and Attagenus piceus (black carpet beetle)
  • built-in obsolescence — a method of stimulating consumer demand by designing products that wear out or become outmoded after limited use.
  • bulletin board system — (communications, application)   (BBS, bboard /bee'bord/, message board, forum; plural: BBSes) A computer and associated software which typically provides an electronic message database where people can log in and leave messages. Messages are typically split into topic groups similar to the newsgroups on Usenet (which is like a distributed BBS). Any user may submit or read any message in these public areas. The term comes from physical pieces of board on which people can pin messages written on paper for general consumption - a "physical bulletin board". Ward Christensen, the programmer and operator of the first BBS (on-line 1978-02-16) called it a CBBS for "computer bulletin board system". Since the rise of the World-Wide Web, the term has become antiquated, though the concept is more popular than ever, with many websites featuring discussion areas where users can post messages for public consumption. Apart from public message areas, some BBSes provided archives of files, personal electronic mail and other services of interest to the system operator (sysop). Thousands of BBSes around the world were run from amateurs' homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Although BBSes were traditionally the domain of hobbyists, many connected directly to the Internet (accessed via telnet), others were operated by government, educational, and research institutions. Fans of Usenet or the big commercial time-sharing bboards such as CompuServe, CIX and GEnie tended to consider local BBSes the low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they helped connect hackers and users in the personal-micro and let them exchange code. Use of this term for a Usenet newsgroup generally marks one either as a newbie fresh in from the BBS world or as a real old-timer predating Usenet.
  • burn the midnight oil — to work or study late into the night
  • businessman's holiday — busman's holiday.
  • butterfly common lisp — A parallel version of Common LISP for the BBN Butterfly computer.
  • button up (one's lip) — to refrain from talking; esp., to keep a secret
  • by fair means or foul — If someone tries to achieve something by fair means or foul, they use every means possible in order to achieve it, and they do not care if their behaviour is dishonest or unfair.
  • cantilever foundation — a building foundation supporting its load partly or wholly upon cantilevers.
  • caroline of brunswick — 1768–1821, wife of George IV of the United Kingdom: tried for adultery (1820)
  • central european time — the standard time adopted by Western European countries one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, corresponding to British Summer Time
  • charge-coupled device — an electronic device, used in imaging and signal processing, in which information is represented as packets of electric charge that are stored in an array of tiny closely spaced capacitors and can be moved from one capacitor to another in a controlled way
  • chequebook journalism — Chequebook journalism is the practice of paying people large sums of money for information about crimes or famous people in order to get material for newspaper articles.
  • choledochojejunostomy — (medicine) The surgical formation of an opening between the common bile duct and the jejunum.
  • circular polarization — electromagnetic radiation (esp light) in which the electric field vector describes a circle about the direction of propagation at any point in the path of the radiation
  • clayton antitrust act — an act of Congress in 1914 supplementing the Sherman Antitrust Act and establishing the FTC.
  • clayton-bulwer treaty — an agreement between the U.S. and Great Britain in 1850 guaranteeing that any canal built to connect the Atlantic and Pacific across Central America would be jointly controlled, open to all nations, and unfortified.
  • clerk to the justices — (in England) a legally qualified person who sits in court with lay justices to advise them on points of law
  • closed-angle glaucoma — angle-closure glaucoma. See under glaucoma.
  • clostridium difficile — Clostridium difficile is a bacterium that causes severe diarrhoea. It is commonly found in hospitals. C.diff is also used.
  • column address strobe — (hardware)   (CAS) A signal sent from a processor (or memory controller) to a dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) (qv) circuit to indicate that the column address lines are valid.
  • column chromatography — the separation of mixtures into their constituents by preferential adsorption by a solid, as a column of silica (column chromatography) or a strip of filter paper (paper chromatography) or by a gel.
  • comfortably-furnished — containing comfortable furniture
  • competitive exclusion — the dominance of one species over another when both are competing for the same resources, etc
  • completing the square — a method, usually of solving quadratic equations, by which a quadratic expression, as x 2 − 4 x + 3, is written as the sum or difference of a perfect square and a constant, x 2 − 4 x + 4 + 3 − 4 = (x − 2) 2 − 1, by addition and subtraction of appropriate constant terms.
  • concurrent resolution — a resolution passed by one branch of a legislature and concurred in by the other, indicating the opinion of the legislature but not having the force of law
  • confidence and supply — denoting an arrangement in a hung parliament in which an opposition party agrees not to vote against a minority government in votes of confidence or budgetary matters but reserves the right to oppose other legislation
  • confused flour beetle — a brown flour beetle, Tribolium confusum, that feeds on stored grain and grain products.
  • congregational church — any evangelical Protestant Christian Church that is governed according to the principles of Congregationalism. In 1972 the majority of churches in the Congregational Church in England and Wales voted to become part of the United Reformed Church
  • constitutional strike — a stoppage of work by the workforce of an organization, with the approval of the trade union concerned, in accordance with the dispute procedure laid down in a collective agreement between the parties
  • constitutionalization — The act or process of establishing a constitution over a state or organization.
  • consultation document — a report that is the result of a consultation process
  • contextual definition — definition of a word or symbol by explaining the meaning of the phrase or statement in which it occurs.
  • continuing resolution — legislation enacted by Congress to allow government operations to continue until the regular appropriations are enacted: used when action on appropriations is not completed by the beginning of a fiscal year.
  • convertible debenture — a convertible bond that is not secured with collateral.
  • convertible insurance — any form of life or health insurance, either individual or group, that enables the insured to change or convert the insurance to another form, as term to whole life insurance or group to individual health insurance.
  • coordination language — (networking, protocol)   A language defined specifically to allow two or more parties (components) to communicate in order to accomplish some shared goal. Examples of coordination languages are Linda and Xerox's CLF (STITCH).
  • coquilles st. jacques — an appetizer of minced scallops in a wine and cream sauce topped with grated cheese and browned under a broiler: usually served in scallop shells.
  • corpuscular radiation — radiation consisting of atomic and subatomic particles, as alpha particles, beta particles, and neutrons.
  • correspondence column — a section of a newspaper or magazine in which are printed readers' letters to the editor
  • cosmological argument — one of the arguments that purport to prove the existence of God from empirical facts about the universe, esp the argument to the existence of a first cause
  • cottony-cushion scale — a small scale insect, Icerya purchasi, that is a pest of citrus trees in California: it is controlled by introducing an Australian ladybird, Rodolia cardinalis, into affected areas
  • counsel of perfection — excellent but unrealizable advice
  • countably compact set — a set for which every cover consisting of a countable number of sets has a subcover consisting of a finite number of sets.
  • counter-revolutionary — Counter-revolutionary activities are activities intended to reverse the effects of a previous revolution.
  • court of common pleas — (formerly) a superior court exercising jurisdiction in civil actions between private citizens
  • croscarmellose sodium — Croscarmellose sodium is a substance used in tablets and capsules as a disintegrant.
  • crude oil dehydration — Crude oil dehydration is the removal of water or water vapor from crude oil, by separating the oil from the water, often in a rotating centrifuge.
  • cultural anthropology — the branch of anthropology dealing with cultural as opposed to biological and racial features
  • cyclical unemployment — unemployment caused by fluctuations in the level of economic activity inherent in trade cycles
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