Grabov Rat : glossary : C

			glossary : C

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Latin abbreviation	ca. : circa : about, approximately
history : Amerindians	Cahuilla : a group of Native Americans that have inhabited California for more than 2000 years; they are widespread division of the Uto-Aztecan language family, who occupied the territory on both sides of the San Jacinto Mountains (originally an area of about 6,200 km²) and still live on 9 reservations in Southern California. Oral legends suggest that the Cahuilla first moved into the Coachella Valley when a large body of water now called Lake Cahuilla was in existence. Fed by the Colorado River, it dried up sometime before 1700, following one of the repeated shifts in the river's changed course. In 1907 a break in a levee created the much smaller Salton Sea in the same location.	Uto-Aztecan Salton Sea
game : chess	Caissa : the muse (or goddess) of chess; the name comes from a nymph in a poem composed in 1763 by Sir William Jones (British, 1746-1794). The poem of the same name was based on Scacchia ludus, composed around 1513 by Marcus Vida (Italian, c.1490-1566), in which the nymph is called Scacchis.
botany & gardening	calcareous : growing on limy soil containing calcium carbonate.
materials : processing	calcination : the process of converting metals to metal oxides without fusing, by heating or burning; calcination is a process in which a material is heated to a temperature below its melting point to induce a thermal decomposition or a phase transition other than melting; material is heated to a high temperature without fusing, so that hydrates, carbonates, or other compounds are decomposed and the volatile material is expelled.
astronomy	calendar : a representation of the time keeping system in which time is divided into days and longer periods (weeks, months and years), and a definite order for these time periods and a relationship among them are established.
botany & gardening	calyx : the outer covering of a flower; its separate leaves called sepals; a collective name for the sepals, the outer whorl of organs in most flowers.
geography : toponym	Camino : the Spanish word meaning 'road', 'trail', or 'route' appears in many road and street names in the southwestern US, and El Camino Real is probably the most popular one. In Spanish days camino real, camino national, or camino principal designated the public roads and trails between presidios, missions, and settlements; they are often erroneously interpreted to mean the 'king's highway'.
botany & gardening	campanulate : bell-shaped, as a corolla.
geography : toponym	Caňada : the Spanish word for 'valley' appears in place names like Caňada de la Dormida ('valley of the sleeping woman', Santa Clara Co., California) and Caňada Montuosa ('canyon full of brush', Monterey Co., California); it was perhaps the most common generic term used in Spanish times of the southwestern US, but unlike the related terms caňon and arroyo, it did not survive as a generic term.
geography : toponym	Canal : an artificial watercourse for transportation and irrigation, e.g. Panama Canal.
geography : physical	cape : a piece of land that extends into a river, a lake, or an ocean; a headland.	headland
economics	capital : assets which are capable of generating income and which have themselves been produced.	assets
botany & gardening	capsule : a dry dehiscent fruit, composed of two or more carpels, that opens to release seeds when mature.
botany & gardening	carpel : a simple pistil, or a single part of a compound pistil, regarded as a modified leaf forming and bearing ovules.
botany & gardening	caryopsis : a grain, the typical seedlike fruit of all grasses, including cereals, with pericarp and seed coat firmly united; a small, one-celled dry indehiscent fruit with the pericarp adherent to the seed coat, the typical fruit of grasses and grains.
	catalyst : a substance that speeds a chemical reaction without itself being affected; it alters the rate of a chemical reaction and may be recovered essentially unaltered in form and amount at the end of the reaction.
slang	catch-22 : a dilemma from which the victim has no escape; from the title of a novel, Catch-22 (1961), by Joseph Heller.
	catchword (catch phrase) : a memorable word or phrase that is often used, a slogan.
botany & gardening	catkin (also: ament) : a spike of unisexual, apetalous flowers having scaly, usually deciduous bracts, as of a willow or birch.
Internet lingo	CBLO : see below
acronym	CE : Common Era : the calendar year designation introduced as a replacement for AD (Anno Domini) to circumvent religious implications; e.g., 135 CE instead of 135 AD. However, BCE/CE system has not been used widely enough so as to have become commonly understood.
Latin abbreviation	cf. : confer : compare
	chalk : a soft, white, powdery limestone consisting chiefly of fossil shells of foramifers.
geography : toponym	Channel : a strait or narrow sea between two larger bodies of water, e.g. the English Channel; compare with Canal.
language : script	character : the smallest component of written language that has semantic value; refers to the abstract meaning and/or shape, rather than a specific shape (see also glyph), though in code tables some form of visual representation is essential for the reader’s understanding; the basic unit of encoding for the Unicode character encoding.	glyph Unicode
game : chess	chess : rating of chess players : see Elo rating
acronym	CIE : The International Commission on Illumination (acronym CIE is for French Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage; has its headquarters in Vienna, Austria) : the international authority on light, illumination, color, and color spaces; the XYZ color space (also called the Norm color system), developed by CIE in 1931, is still used as a standard reference for defining colors, and as a reference for other color spaces.	color color space
computing & web acronym	CIELAB (CIELab) : the color space defined by the CIE in 1976 (also called the Lab color space), built by the CIELAB color model with one channel for luminance (lightness, L) and two color channels (a and b); the a axis extends from green (-a) to red (+a) and the b axis from blue (-b) to yellow (+b). CIELAB is a response to the problem with the XYZ color space where colorimetric distances between the individual colors do not correspond to perceived color differences; in CIELAB the color differences perceived by human eye correspond to distances measured colorimetrically. Because CIELAB describes how a color looks rather than how much of a particular colorant is needed for a device to produce colors, CIELAB is considered to be a device independent color model.	color model color space
economics acronym	cif/fob : a measure of the value merchandise trade. Imports include 'carriage, insurance and freight' (cif) from the exporting country to the importing. The value of exports does not include these elements and is recorded 'free on board' (fob). Balance of payment statistics are generally adjusted so that both exports and imports are shown fob; the cif elements are included in invisibles.
botany & gardening	cladophyll (also: cladode) : a leaflike flattened branch that resembles and functions as leaf.
games : tennis	claycourt : court with a surface made of crushed shale, stone or brick; it can be red or green; example: the French Open is played on clay.
	climate : (from ancient Greek: κλίμα, ‘clime’) : a weather averaged over a long period of time, typically 30 years. Somewhat more precisely, the concept of 'climate' also includes the statistics of the weather - such as the degree of day-to-day or year-to-year variation expected. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) glossary definition is: Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the 'average weather', or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.
computing & web acronym	CMY : cyan, magenta, yellow; see CMY color model;
	CMY color model : a subtractive color model in which cyan, magenta, and yellow are primary colors. Whereas the RGB color model describes a light source, the CMY color model describes the light absorbing quality of a visual target, such as ink printed on paper: as white light strikes translucent inks, a portion of the spectrum is absorbed and colored light that is not absorbed is reflected back to the eye. Cyan is the opposite of red, meaning that the ink with cyan pigment acts like a filter that absorbs red; the amount of cyan pigment applied to a paper will control how much red will show. Magenta is the opposite of green, and yellow is the opposite of blue. Combining pure cyan, magenta, and yellow pigments would result in black by absorbing all colors. In CMY printing mode, each of the process inks can use a value ranging from 0 to 100%; the lightest colors are assigned small percentages of process ink colors (visual target close to white) while darker colors have higher percentage values (visual target closer to black). For example, a bright red might contain 2% cyan, 93% magenta, and 90% yellow.	color model subtractive color
computing & web acronym	CMYK : cyan, magenta, yellow, key; see CMYK color printing model;
	CMYK color printing model : a color printing model based on CMY color model plus black ink (pigment) added for better shadow density; the CMY inks usually cannot be combined to create a true black. The letter K came into use for the black component because B stands for blue and black is the 'key' color for registering other colors.	color model
geography : toponym abbrev.	Co. : County : as a generic term, county is a small administrative district of a country, especially a local administrative subdivision of an American State, which in turn is divided into townships.
geology	cobble : a rock or rock fragment with a grain size 2.5 to 10 inch (64 to 254 mm).
	cognition : the act or process of perceiving or knowing.
materials : fuels	coke : the solid product resulting from the destructive distillation of coal in a closed chamber, left after coal gas and coal tar have been extracted from coal, used chiefly as a fuel in metallurgy to reduce metal oxides to metals.
	color (colour) : the human eye perception of the electromagnetic radiation within the human visibility range (approximately from 380 nm to 760 nm; the visible spectrum). Most light sources are not pure spectral sources (single radiation wavelength); rather they are created from mixtures of various wavelengths and intensities of light. To the human eye, however, there is a wide class of mixed-spectrum light that is perceived the single color, same as a pure spectral color.
	color, additive : a mixture of lights (colors) emitted directly from a source or illuminant of some sort. A large percentage of the visible spectrum can be represented by mixing red, green, and blue colored light in various proportions and intensities; this is the essence of RGB color model. Additive colors are used for lighting, television, and computer monitors; for example, computer monitor creates colors by red, green, and blue phosphors.
	color, complementary : complementary colors are two colors directly across from each other on the color wheel; these are typically colors that will produce a strong contrast; examples: red - cyan, green - magenta, blue - yellow.
computing & web	color depth (pixel depth) : the number of bits used to represent the color of a single pixel in a raster image. The number of distinct colors that can be represented by a pixel depends on the color depth, i.e. the number of bits per pixel (bpp); common values are: 8 bpp (256 colors), 16 bpp (65,536 colors; known as highcolor), 24 bpp (16,777,216 colors; known as truecolor).	raster image pixel bit
	color gamut : a certain complete subset of colors of the visible color space that can be represented, detected, or reproduced by an imaging process or device; the range of color encompassed by a color space.
computing & web	color, indexed : the color of a pixel assigned an index into a list of colors, called a palette; commonly used for color depth up to 8 bpp but it could be a selection of colors from a higher color depth.
computing & web	color model : a parametric procedure for describing and classifying colors. Most color models employ three parameters; for example, RGB color model employs three primary colors (red, green, and blue) while HSB color model employs three fundamental characteristics of the human perception of color (hue, saturation, and brightness). Note that color model itself does not define any particular color unless the reference values of the color space are supplied; as a consequence, a number of color spaces could be built using the same color model.
computing & web	color space : a set of colors determined by the color model and the reference values of the space. The reference values serve to establish an ''imprint' of the parameters' values in the visible spectrum; for example, reference values of the RGB color space institute the meaning of red, green, and blue plus the white point requirement. The number of possible colors in a color space depends on the color depth (pixel depth, i.e. the number of bits available for each parameter of the model used).
	color, subtractive : a mixture of reflected lights (colors), i.e. a mixture of colored lights which are not absorbed (subtracted); in this sense it is equivalent of pigment mixing: for example, when white light strikes a yellow pigment, all of the visible spectrum but the yellow light is absorbed. A large percentage of the reflected light can be represented as a mixture of cyan, magenta, and yellow colored light in various proportions and intensities; this is the essence of CMY color model. Subtractive colors are used for printing and painting, i.e. in mixing paints, dyes, inks, and natural colorants.
	color wheel : colors' representation on a wheel of 12 colors: three primary colors, three secondary colors (created by mixing primary colors), and six tertiary colors (created by mixing the primary and secondary colors). Artists use a traditional color wheel based on the RYB (red, yellow, blue) model with secondary colors of orange, green, and purple. For all computer-based colors, a wheel based on the RGB model is used; this encompasses the CMY model as well since cyan, magenta, and yellow are the secondary colors in RGB model.
economics	commodity : a tangible good or service resulting from the process of production; (in general usage) a primary product such as coffee, wool and copper. On the commodities market it is not necessary for the commodities to be physically exchanged, only rights to ownership need be.
botany & gardening	compound : composed of several similar parts that combine to form a whole; divided into separate leaflets, or formed of several ripened ovaries, e.g. blackberries.
	computer : an electronic device that processes information to perform or assist in the performance of a task; it requires digital data input and transmission and modification algorithms to perform numerical and logical calculations and to output the desired information type and content.	device algorithm
	computing : the theory and practice of the operation and usage procedures of the electronic computer. Note: initially, the term computing was synonymous with counting and calculating, and a computer was a person who computes.
Latin abbreviation	con. : contra : against
botany & gardening	conceptacle : a sac opening outwards and containing reproductive cells, found in certain primitive plants.
	Conference Board, The : a non-profit global business organization composed of business executives that hosts conferences, conducts business management research, and produces a number of economic statistics, including the Consumer Confidence Index, CEO Confidence index, the Help Wanted index, and indexes of leading indicators, coincident indicators, and lagging indicators. The organization was founded in 1916 as the (US) National Industrial Conference Board. A similar but separate organization exists in Canada, Conference Board of Canada. The Conference Board also publishes a magazine of ideas and opinion, called Across the Board from 1976 to 2006 and The Conference Board Review henceforth.
	congenital : existing since a person's birth; a congenital defect is considered to be one that is not carried in the genes but results from conditions of birth.
	conjoint : joined together, united; combined, associated
natural philosophy	constant, mathematical : a quantity, usually a real number or a complex number, that arises unchanged in mathematical relationships; unlike physical constants, mathematical constants are defined independently of any measurement; examples: Pi (π ≈ 3.14159), base of Natural logarithm (e ≈ 2.71828), and Golden ratio (φ ≈ 1.61803).
natural philosophy	constant, physical : physical constant : a value of a physical quantity that is generally believed to be both universal in nature and not believed to change in time; examples: Planck's constant (h), the gravitational constant (G), the speed of light in the vacuum (c₀), the electric constant (e₀), and the elementary charge (e).
economics	consumption : the use of resources to satisfy current needs and wants; it may be measured statistically by the sum of consumers' current expenditure; however, such statistics may be inadequate as expenditure on durable goods (such as washing-machines) which are not entirely consumed in the current period.
	conundrum : any question or thing of a perplexing nature, as in "life is full of conundrums"; a hard question, a riddle whose answer usually involves a pun.
botany & gardening	coriaceous : having a leathery texture; of or like leather.
botany & gardening	corm : the short, enlarged, fleshy subterranean part (base) of a stem resembling a bulb, but solid, as in the crocus; in it are stored reserve materials.
botany & gardening	corolla : the inner envelope of floral leaves of a flower, usually of delicate texture and of some color other than green.
botany & gardening	corymb : a flat-topped or round-topped (convex) inflorescence of stalked flowers sprouting from different levels; the outermost flowers being the first to open.
botany & gardening	costatus : ribbed, as in leaves.
botany & gardening	cotyledon : in the embryo of a plant, a seed leaf; the earliest leaf or one of the earliest leaves growing out of a seed and usually having the function of nourishing the elementary plant; plants may have one, two, or more cotyledons, being mono-, di-, or polycotyledonous.
acronym	CPI : consumer price index (also called: retail prices index) : an index of the prices of goods and services purchased by consumers/households to measure the rate of inflation or the cost of living. The weights used in the index are revised annually and are based on the proportion of household expenditure spent on each item. It is one of several price indices calculated by national statistical agencies. The CPI can be used to adjust wages and salary awards, pensions and index-linked assets, regulated or contracted prices. The CPI is, along with the population census and the National Income and Product Accounts, one of the most closely watched national economic statistics.
acronym	CPI : corruption perception index
economics	credit : the use or possession of goods and services without immediate payment; credit enables a producer to bridge the gap between the production and sale of goods, and a consumer to purchase goods out of future income.	income
botany & gardening	crocus : any of the small, bulbous plants of the genus Crocus, of the iris family, cultivated for their showy, solitary flowers, which are among the first to bloom in the spring.
agriculture	crop : a plant or animal grown for its commercial value.
	crystal : a homogeneous solid object with a characteristic chemical composition (an element, chemical compound or isomorphous mixture) in which atoms or molecules are arranged in a regularly repeating pattern.	isomorphism
	crystalline : pertaining to, resembling, or composed of crystals.
botany & gardening	culm : the hollow stem of grasses and sedges, usually jointed.
botany & gardening	cultivar : a variety of plant originated and persisted under cultivation; a horticultural selection.
botany & gardening	cyme : a branched inflorescence in which the stem (primary axis) terminates in a flower that blooms first, and other flowers are developed at the end of lateral branches.

UPDATED : 2008-01-30

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