15-letter words containing a, b, e, r
- prairie warbler — an eastern North American wood warbler, Dendroica discolor, olive-green above, yellow below, and striped with black on the face and sides.
- pre-celebration — an act of celebrating.
- pre-elizabethan — (of English culture, history, traditions, etc.) before the reign of Queen Elizabeth I; before the second half of the 16th century.
- pre-established — to establish beforehand.
- predeterminable — able to be predetermined; able to be determined in advance
- presbyterianism — church government by presbyters or elders, equal in rank and organized into graded administrative courts.
- presbyterianize — to convert or be converted into Presbyterianism
- prima ballerina — the principal ballerina in a ballet company.
- prisoner's base — any of various children's games in which each of two teams has a home base where members of the opposing team are kept prisoner after being tagged or caught and from which they can be freed only in specified ways.
- private pay bed — (in Britain) a bed in a National Health Service hospital, reserved for private patients who pay a consultant acting privately for treatment and who are charged by the health service for use of hospital facilities
- probation order — an order imposed by a magistrate or judge under which an offender is sentenced to probation rather than imprisonment
- probationership — the position of a probationer
- probit equation — A probit equation is used to quantify the relationship between the concentration of a dangerous material and its effect on people.
- problematically — of the nature of a problem; doubtful; uncertain; questionable.
- procrustean bed — a plan or scheme to produce uniformity or conformity by arbitrary or violent methods.
- pulmobranchiate — possessing a pulmobranch
- put years on sb — If you say that something such as an experience or a way of dressing has put years on someone, you mean that it has made them look or feel much older.
- pyrimidine base — any of a number of similar compounds having a basic structure that is derived from pyrimidine, including cytosine, thymine, and uracil, which are constituents of nucleic acids
- pyrometric bead — (in a kiln) a ball of material that indicates by changing color that a certain temperature has been reached.
- quadruple bucky — Obsolete. 1. On an MIT space-cadet keyboard, use of all four of the shifting keys (control, meta, hyper, and super) while typing a character key. 2. On a Stanford or MIT keyboard in raw mode, use of four shift keys while typing a fifth character, where the four shift keys are the control and meta keys on *both* sides of the keyboard. This was very difficult to do! One accepted technique was to press the left-control and left-meta keys with your left hand, the right-control and right-meta keys with your right hand, and the fifth key with your nose. Quadruple-bucky combinations were very seldom used in practice, because when one invented a new command one usually assigned it to some character that was easier to type. If you want to imply that a program has ridiculously many commands or features, you can say something like: "Oh, the command that makes it spin the tapes while whistling Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is quadruple-bucky-cokebottle." See double bucky, bucky bits, cokebottle.
- quarter binding — a style of bookbinding in which the spine is leather and the sides are cloth or paper.
- quarter blanket — a horse blanket, usually placed under a saddle or harness and extending to the horse's tail.
- qwerty keyboard — a keyboard having the arrangement of alphabetical and numerical keys found on the traditional typewriter
- ram-air turbine — a small air-driven turbine fitted to an aircraft to provide power in the event of a failure of the normal systems
- random variable — a quantity that takes any of a set of values with specified probabilities.
- rational number — a number that can be expressed exactly by a ratio of two integers.
- rayside-balfour — a town in S Ontario, in S Canada.
- rechargeability — (of a storage battery) capable of being charged repeatedly. Compare cordless (def 2).
- recognizability — to identify as something or someone previously seen, known, etc.: He had changed so much that one could scarcely recognize him.
- recombinant dna — DNA in which one or more segments or genes have been inserted, either naturally or by laboratory manipulation, from a different molecule or from another part of the same molecule, resulting in a new genetic combination.
- recombinational — belonging or relating to recombination
- reconcilability — capable of being reconciled.
- reconstitutable — to constitute again; reconstruct; recompose.
- record-breaking — top, most successful
- recoverableness — the ability to be recovered or chance of being able to recover
- red-back spider — a venomous spider, Latrodectus hasselti, of Australia and New Zealand, related to the black widow spider and having a bright red stripe on the back.
- refectory table — a long, narrow table having a single stretcher between trestlelike supports at the ends.
- refreshment bar — a bar or stall that offers a variety of drinks for sale
- reggio calabria — a seaport in S Italy, on the Strait of Messina: almost totally destroyed by an earthquake 1908.
- regimental band — a band made up of a military formation varying in size from a battalion to a number of battalions
- relational dbms — relational database
- rememberability — the quality of being easily remembered
- remembrance day — (in Canada) November 11, observed as a legal holiday in memory of those who died in World Wars I and II, similar to Veterans Day in the U.S.
- rent-stabilized — regulated by law so that rent increases may not exceed a specified amount.
- restabilization — the act or process of stabilizing or the state of being stabilized.
- retail business — a firm which sells goods to individual customers
- retained object — an object in a passive construction identical with the direct or indirect object in the active construction from which it is derived, as the picture in I was shown the picture, which is also the direct object in the active construction (They) showed me the picture.
- retrievableness — the state or quality of being retrievable
- reuben sandwich — a grilled sandwich of corned beef, Swiss cheese, and sauerkraut on rye bread.
- rhombencephalon — the hindbrain.