20-letter words containing a, b, r, g
- go from bad to worse — worsen
- good loser/bad loser — If someone is a good loser, they accept that they have lost a game or contest without complaining. If someone is a bad loser, they hate losing and complain about it.
- gorno-altai republic — a constituent republic of S Russia: mountainous, rising over 4350 m (14 500 ft) in the Altai Mountains of the south. Capital: Gorno-Altaisk. Pop: 202 900 (2002). Area: 92 600 sq km (35 740 sq miles)
- greatest lower bound — a lower bound that is greater than or equal to all the lower bounds of a given set: 1 is the greatest lower bound of the set consisting of 1, 2, 3. Abbreviation: glb.
- grey-crowned babbler — an insect-eating Australian bird, Pomatostomus temporalis of the family Timaliidae
- grievous bodily harm — law: serious injury
- hildegard von bingen — Hildegard von (Hildegard of Bingen"Sibyl of the Rhine") 1098–1178, German nun, healer, writer, and composer.
- hungarian bromegrass — a pasture grass, Bromus inermis, native to Europe, having smooth blades.
- hyperbolic cotangent — a hyperbolic function that is the ratio of cosh to sinh, being the reciprocal of tanh; coth
- integration by parts — Mathematics. a method of evaluating an integral by use of the formula, ∫udv = uv − ∫vdu.
- intervening variable — a hypothetical variable postulated to account for the way in which a set of independent variables control a set of dependent variables
- job control language — a language used to construct statements that identify a particular job to be run and specify the job's requirements to the operating system under which it will run. Abbreviation: JCL.
- laboratory diagnosis — scientific analysis of a disease
- labour-saving device — a machine, gadget, etc, that reduces (human) effort, hard work or labour
- law of large numbers — the theorem in probability theory that the number of successes increases as the number of experiments increases and approximates the probability times the number of experiments for a large number of experiments.
- magdeburg hemisphere — one of a pair of hemispherical cups from which air can be evacuated when they are placed together: used to demonstrate the force of air pressure.
- marginal probability — (in a multivariate distribution) the probability of one variable taking a specific value irrespective of the values of the others
- megabytes per second — (unit) (MBps, MB/s) Millions of bytes per second. A unit of data rate. 1 MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes per second (not 1,048,576).
- microwave background — a background of microwave electromagnetic radiation with a black-body spectrum discovered in 1965, understood to be the thermal remnant of the big bang with which the universe began
- navigable semicircle — the less violent half of a cyclone; the half blowing in the direction opposite to that in which the cyclone is moving and in which a vessel can run before the wind.
- neighbourhood warden — a person employed by a local authority to patrol residential areas and deal with antisocial behaviour
- nictitating membrane — a thin membrane, or inner or third eyelid, present in many animals, capable of being drawn across the eyeball, as for protection.
- northern leaf blight — a disease of corn caused by the fungus Exsherohilum turcicum, characterized by elongate tan-gray elliptical spots with subsequent blighting and necrosis of leaves.
- off-the-job training — training which is carried out away from your normal place of work
- on the drawing board — in the planning stage
- order bill of lading — a bill of lading that is issued to the order of a shipper or consignee for delivery of the goods and that can be transferred by endorsement to third parties.
- red badge of courage — a novel (1895) by Stephen Crane.
- red-winged blackbird — a North American blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus, the male of which is black with scarlet patches, usually bordered with buff or yellow, on the bend of the wing.
- regenerative braking — Regenerative braking is a form of braking in electric vehicles in which the loss of kinetic energy from braking is stored and then fed back later to provide power to the electric motor.
- rough-legged buzzard — a buzzard, Buteo lagopus, of Europe, Asia, and North America, having feathers covering its legs
- royal british legion — an organization founded in 1921 to provide services and assistance for former members of the armed forces
- rub up the wrong way — to arouse anger (in); annoy
- semiautobiographical — pertaining to or being a fictionalized account of an author's own life.
- server message block — (protocol) (SMB) A client/server protocol that provides file and printer sharing between computers. In addition SMB can share serial ports and communications abstractions such as named pipes and mail slots. SMB is similar to remote procedure call (RPC) specialised for file system access. SMB was developed by Intel, Microsoft, and IBM in the early 1980s. It has also had input from Xerox and 3Com. It is the native method of file and print sharing for Microsoft operating systems; where it is called Microsoft Networking. Windows for Workgroups, Windows 95, and Windows NT all include SMB clients and servers. SMB is also used by OS/2, Lan Manager and Banyan Vines. There are SMB servers and clients for Unix, for example Samba and smbclient. SMB is a presentation layer protocol structured as a large set of commands (Server Message Blocks). There are commands to support file sharing, printer sharing, user authentication, resource browsing, and other miscellaneous functions. As clients and servers may implement different versions ("dialects") of the protocol they negotiate before starting a session. The redirector packages SMB requests into a network control block (NBC) structure that can be sent across the network to a remote device. SMB originally ran on top of the lower level protocols NetBEUI and NetBIOS, but now typically runs over TCP/IP. Microsoft have developed an extended version of SMB for the Internet, the Common Internet File System (CIFS), which in most cases replaces SMB. CIFS runs only runs over TCP/IP.
- set the ball rolling — to open or initiate (an action, discussion, movement, etc)
- star spangled banner — Stars and Stripes.
- star-spangled banner — Stars and Stripes.
- straight-cut tobacco — tobacco that is cut in such a way that it will lie flat.
- to be a warning shot — to be a warning
- to be at loggerheads — to be in conflict
- to be walking on air — If you say that you are walking on air or floating on air, you mean that you feel extremely happy about something.
- to bring up the rear — If a person or vehicle is bringing up the rear, they are the last person or vehicle in a moving line of them.
- to get your bearings — to find out where one is or to find out what one should do next
- to get your own back — If you get your own back on someone, you have your revenge on them because of something bad that they have done to you.
- travelling-wave tube — an electronic tube in which an electron beam interacts with a distributed high-frequency magnetic field so that energy is transferred from the beam to the field
- trustee savings bank — a British financial institution which offered savings facilities for small investors and was managed by unpaid trustees. Depositors had no voting rights and no say in financial or managerial matters. The bank is now a public limited company with the same rights and services as other banks and only retains the title in the abbreviated form TSB.
- tubing head pressure — The tubing head pressure is the pressure on the tubing, which is measured at the wellhead.
- vertical lift bridge — lift bridge.
- walton and weybridge — a city in Surrey, SE England: a London suburb.
- wintergreen barberry — a Chinese evergreen shrub, Berberis julianae, of the barberry family, having spiny leaves, dark green above, pale beneath, clusters of yellow flowers, and bluish-black fruit.