18-letter words containing a, b, o, r, t
- beefsteak mushroom — an edible bracket fungus, Fistulina hepatica, that grows on trees and can rot the heartwood of living oaks and chestnuts.
- behaviour patterns — the characteristic ways in which a person or animal acts
- bel and the dragon — a book of the Apocrypha that is included as chapter 14 of Daniel in the Douay Bible.
- benchmark position — a public service job used for comparison with a similar position, such as a position in commerce, for wage settlements
- bernard montgomery — Bernard Law, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein ("Monty") 1887–1976, British field marshal: World War II commander of British 8th Army in Africa and Europe.
- bernard of menthon — Saint(11th cent.); Fr. monk who founded hospices in the Swiss Alps: his day is May 28
- bernoulli equation — Hydrodynamics. Bernoulli's theorem (def 2).
- best-ball foursome — a match, scored by holes, between two pairs of players, in which the score of the lower scoring member of each pair is taken as their score for the hole.
- bichromate process — any of several methods of photography in which the light-sensitive medium is alkaline bichromate associated with a colloid such as gum, albumen, or gelatin.
- biodiversification — the process by which the diversity of plants or animals develops or is increased within a particular region or group of organisms.
- bioinstrumentation — the use of instruments, as sensors, to detect and measure certain body functions, as of persons in spaceflight, and transmit the data to a point where it is evaluated
- biological control — the control of destructive organisms by the use of other organisms, such as the natural predators of the pests
- biological parents — the biological mother and father of a child
- biological therapy — biotherapy
- bipolar transistor — (electronics) A transistor made from a sandwich of n- and p-type semiconductor material: either npn or pnp. The middle section is known as the "base" and the other two as the "collector" and "emitter". When used as an amplifying element, the base to emitter junction is in a "forward-biased" (conducting) condition, and the base to collector junction is "reverse-biased" or non-conducting. Small changes in the base to emitter current (the input signal) cause either holes (for pnp devices) or free electrons (for npn) to enter the base from the emitter. The attracting voltage of the collector causes the majority of these charges to cross into and be collected by the collector, resulting in amplification. Contrast field effect transistor.
- birds of a feather — If you refer to two people as birds of a feather, you mean that they have the same interests or are very similar.
- biz-core stability — (security) Internet security products which secure the business core.
- black-necked stork — a large Australian stork, Xenorhyncus asiaticus, having a white plumage, dark green back and tail, and red legs
- blocking capacitor — a capacitor that blocks the passage of direct current but allows alternating current to pass
- board of directors — A company's board of directors is the group of people elected by its shareholders to manage the company.
- board of education — a group or agency with responsibility for education
- board of elections — a bipartisan board appointed usually by local authorities and charged with control of elections and voting procedure.
- borax pentahydrate — a white, crystalline, water-soluble solid, Na 2 B 4 O 7 ⋅5H 2 O, used chiefly for killing weeds, as a water softener, and as a disinfectant and deodorizing agent.
- bore the pants off — to bore extremely
- borosilicate glass — any of a range of heat- and chemical-resistant glasses, such as Pyrex, prepared by fusing together boron(III) oxide, silicon dioxide, and, usually, a metal oxide
- boston brown bread — a dark, sweetened, steamed bread made of cornmeal, rye or wheat flour, etc., and molasses
- bottom dead center — Bottom dead center is the point at which the piston of an engine is nearest to the axis of the crankshaft. On a vertical engine, this is the lowest point that the piston reaches.
- bottom dead centre — the position of the crank of a reciprocating engine when the piston is at its nearest point to the crankshaft
- boundary condition — a stated restriction, usually in the form of an equation, that limits the possible solutions to a differential equation.
- bounty-fed farmers — farmers who benefit from subsidies
- bourdon-tube gauge — an instrument for measuring the pressure of gases or liquids, consisting of a semicircular or coiled, flexible metal tube attached to a gauge that records the degree to which the tube is straightened by the pressure of the gas or liquid inside.
- branch instruction — a machine-language or assembly-language instruction that causes the computer to branch to another instruction
- branch to fishkill — (IBM: from the location of one of the corporation's facilities) Any unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. See jump off into never-never land, hyperspace.
- branching fraction — (in branching) the proportion of the disintegrating nuclei that follow a particular branch to the total number of disintegrating nuclides
- brand-name product — A brand-name product is one which is made by a well-known manufacturer and has the manufacturer's label on it.
- breach of contract — the act of breaking the conditions of a contract
- breach of security — an act that violates a country, area, or building's security measures
- breathe one's last — When someone breathes their last, they die.
- british somaliland — a former British protectorate (1884–1960) in E Africa, on the Gulf of Aden: united with Italian Somaliland in 1960 to form Somalia (or the Somali Republic); in 1991 the self-styled republic of Somaliland, covering the same area as the former British Somaliland, declared itself independent and continues to function largely as a separate entity, though without international recognition
- broadcasting house — any of a number of buildings in the UK from which the BBC broadcasts or has broadcast
- broken twill weave — a twill weave in which the direction of the diagonal produced by the weft threads is reversed after no more than two passages of the weft.
- bromochloromethane — chlorobromomethane.
- brothers karamazov — a novel (1880) by Dostoevsky.
- brute force attack — (cryptography) A method of breaking a cipher (that is, to decrypt a specific encrypted text) by trying every possible key. The quicker the brute force attack, the weaker the cipher. Feasibility of brute force attack depends on the key length of the cipher, and on the amount of computational power available to the attacker. Brute force attack is impossible against the ciphers with variable-size key, such as a one-time pad cipher.
- burkitt's lymphoma — a cancer characterized by tumors containing lymphoid cells, occurring esp. in children, in the jaw, eyes, and internal organs: it is associated with the Epstein-Barr virus
- butler's sideboard — a sideboard, often with a fall front, having on its top a china cabinet with glazed doors.
- cabernet sauvignon — a black grape originally grown in the Bordeaux area of France, and now throughout the wine-producing world
- cabinet government — parliamentary government.
- cambrian mountains — a mountain range in Wales, extending from Carmarthenshire in the S to Denbighshire in the N. Highest peak: Aran Fawddwy, 891 m (2970 ft)
- cape breton island — an island off SE Canada, in NE Nova Scotia, separated from the mainland by the Strait of Canso: its easternmost point is Cape Breton. Pop: 132 298 (2006). Area: 10 280 sq km (3970 sq miles)