14-letter words containing a, b, d, s
- bedside manner — A doctor's bedside manner is the way in which they talk to their patients.
- benday process — a process for adding tone or shading, as in reproducing drawings, by the overlay on the plate of patterns, as of dots
- berberidaceous — of, relating to, or belonging to the Berberidaceae, a mainly N temperate family of flowering plants (mostly shrubs), including barberry and barrenwort
- berkner island — an island in Antarctica, in the S Weddell Sea, between the Ronne Ice Shelf and the Filchner Ice Shelf.
- bermuda shorts — close-fitting shorts that come down to the knees
- beyond measure — If you say that something has changed or that it has affected you beyond measure, you are emphasizing that it has done this to a great extent.
- bicuspid valve — mitral valve
- bidialectalism — the state of being bidialectal
- bildungsromane — a type of novel concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young protagonist.
- binding strake — a very strong, heavy strake of planking, especially one next to a sheer strake.
- bird sanctuary — an area of land in which birds are protected and encouraged to breed
- birds and bees — any warm-blooded vertebrate of the class Aves, having a body covered with feathers, forelimbs modified into wings, scaly legs, a beak, and no teeth, and bearing young in a hard-shelled egg.
- bitmap display — (hardware) A computer output device where each pixel displayed on the monitor screen corresponds directly to one or more bits in the computer's video memory. Such a display can be updated extremely rapidly since changing a pixel involves only a single processor write to memory compared with a terminal or VDU connected via a serial line where the speed of the serial line limits the speed at which the display can be changed. Most modern personal computers and workstations have bitmap displays, allowing the efficient use of graphical user interfaces, interactive graphics and a choice of on-screen fonts. Some more expensive systems still delegate graphics operations to dedicated hardware such as graphics accelerators. The bitmap display might be traced back to the earliest days of computing when the Manchester University Mark I(?) computer, developed by F.C. Williams and T. Kilburn shortly after the Second World War. This used a storage tube as its working memory. Phosphor dots were used to store single bits of data which could be read by the user and interpreted as binary numbers.
- black and tans — Usually, Black and Tans. an armed force of about 6000 soldiers sent by the British government to Ireland in June, 1920, to suppress revolutionary activity: so called from the colors of their uniform.
- black diamonds — carbonado1 .
- black redstart — a small, Passerine bird, Phoenicurus ochruros, found in Central and S Europe
- blade-shearing — the shearing of sheep using hand shears
- blind as a bat — having extremely poor eyesight
- blind staggers — the staggers
- blind stamping — an impression on a book cover without using colour or gold leaf
- blister-packed — presented in a blister pack
- blood and guts — dealing with or depicting war or violence, especially in a lurid manner: a blood-and-guts movie.
- blood-and-guts — dealing with or depicting war or violence, especially in a lurid manner: a blood-and-guts movie.
- blue-arsed fly — a blowfly; bluebottle
- boarding house — A boarding house is a house which people pay to stay in for a short time.
- boatswain bird — tropic bird.
- bobo-dioulasso — a city in W Burkina Faso. Pop: 396 000 (2005 est)
- body mechanics — body exercises that are intended to improve one's posture, stamina, poise, etc.
- body snatching — the act or practice of robbing a grave to obtain a cadaver for dissection.
- border disease — a congenital infectious disease of sheep and goats caused by a Togavirus and characterized by abortion, infertility, and deformity of lambs
- born yesterday — brought forth by birth.
- boundary-stone — a stone marking a boundary, sometimes giving information such as the initials of the local authority in whose jurisdiction the boundary is
- bow and scrape — to behave in an excessively deferential or obsequious way
- braddock hills — a town in SE Pennsylvania.
- bradford score — a measure of the amount of time during which an employee is absent from work, based on assigning a number of points according to the frequency and length of absences
- brandy snifter — snifter (def 1).
- bras d'or lake — an arm of the Atlantic Ocean in the center Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia, Canada. 360 sq. mi. (930 sq. km).
- brazing solder — an alloy of copper and zinc for joining two metal surfaces by melting the alloy so that it forms a thin layer between the surfaces
- breakfast food — any prepared cereal for breakfast
- breast-feeding — to nurse (a baby) at the breast; suckle.
- bridge passage — bridge1 (def 7).
- british dollar — any of several coins formerly issued by the British Empire for use in certain territories, as the Straits dollar or the Hong Kong dollar.
- broad-spectrum — effective against a wide variety of diseases or microorganisms
- brood parasite — a young bird hatched and reared by birds of a different species as a result of brood parasitism.
- cambridge lisp — A flavour of Lisp using BCPL. Sources owned by Fitznorman partners.
- cambridgeshire — a county of E England, in East Anglia: includes the former counties of the Isle of Ely and Huntingdon and lies largely in the Fens: Peterborough became an independent unitary authority in 1998. Administrative centre: Cambridge. Pop (excluding Peterborough): 571 000 (2003 est). Area (excluding Peterborough): 3068 sq km (184 sq miles)
- celebratedness — the quality or condition of being celebrated
- celestial body — an object visible in the sky, such as a planet
- citizens' band — Citizens' Band is a range of radio frequencies which the general public is allowed to use to send messages to each other and is used especially by truck drivers in their vehicles. The abbreviation CB is often used.
- contrabandists — Plural form of contrabandist.