12-letter words containing a, b, s, t, e
- battlefields — Plural form of battlefield.
- battlefronts — Plural form of battlefront.
- battlewagons — Plural form of battlewagon.
- be at a loss — If you say that you are at a loss, you mean that you do not know what to do in a particular situation.
- beamsplitter — Alternative spelling of beam splitter.
- bean sprouts — the sprouts of newly germinated mung beans, eaten as a vegetable, esp in Chinese dishes
- bean-shooter — peashooter.
- bear witness — to give written or oral testimony
- beardtongues — Plural form of beardtongue.
- beaufort sea — part of the Arctic Ocean off the N coast of North America
- beautifulest — (dated) Most beautiful; more beautiful than anyone or anything else.
- beauty salon — A beauty salon is the same as a beauty parlour.
- beauty sleep — sleep, esp sleep before midnight
- beauty strip — a narrow forest corridor left uncut alongside a road or body of water.
- beaver state — Oregon (used as a nickname).
- beggar-ticks — any of various plants, such as the bur marigold and tick trefoil, having fruits or seeds that cling to clothing, fur, etc
- below stairs — People sometimes use below stairs to refer to the servants in a rich household and the things that are connected with them.
- belteshazzar — the Babylonian name given to Daniel. Dan. 1:7.
- benefactress — a female benefactor
- bespectacled — Someone who is bespectacled is wearing glasses.
- beta orionis — Rigel
- beta testing — (programming) Evaluation of a pre-release (potentially unreliable) version of a piece of software (or possibly hardware) by making it available to selected users ("beta testers") before it goes on general distribution. Beta testign aims to discover bugs that only occur in certain environments or under certain patterns of use, while reducing the volume of feedback to a manageable level. The testers benefit by having earlier access to new products, features and fixes. Beta testing may be preceded by "alpha testing", performed in-house by a handful of users (e.g. other developers or friends), who can be expected to give rapid, high quality feedback on design and usability. Once the product is considered to be usable for its intended purpose it then moves on to "beta testing" by a larger, but typically still limited, number of ordinary users, who may include external customers. Some companies such as Google or Degree Jungle stretch the definition, claiming their products are "in beta" for many months by millions of users. The term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the industry. "Alpha test" was the unit test, module test or component test phase; "Beta Test" was initial system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that the engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production design.
- beta version — beta testing
- beth midrash — a place where Jews gather to study the Talmud and other religious writings; a small synagogue.
- beth shammai — the school of Jewish legal thought and hermeneutics founded in Jerusalem in the 1st century b.c. by the Jewish teacher Shammai and characterized by an austere or rigid interpretation of Jewish law and tradition.
- bidialectism — proficient in or using two dialects of the same language.
- bien pensant — a right-thinking person
- bilateralism — the practice of being bilateral
- billingsgate — the largest fish market in London, on the N bank of the River Thames; moved to new site at Canary Wharf in 1982 and the former building converted into offices
- biomagnetics — the study of magnetic fields as a form of therapy
- biomagnetism — animal magnetism.
- biosatellite — an artificial satellite for carrying living organisms
- biscuit ware — unglazed earthenware
- biting stage — the second part of the oral phase of psychosexual development, approximately 8 to18 months of age, during which a child has the urge to bite or chew objects.
- bitter aloes — a bitter purgative drug made from the leaves of several species of aloe
- bitter lakes — two lakes, the Great Bitter Lake and Little Bitter Lake in NE Egypt: part of the Suez Canal
- black forest — wooded mountain region in SW Germany
- black sapote — a tropical American tree, Diospyros digyna, related to the persimmon, having sweet, edible, green fruit that turns black when ripe.
- black scoter — a scoter of Eurasia and North America, Melanitta nigra, the adult male of which is black.
- black stream — a warm ocean current in the Pacific, flowing N along the E coast of Taiwan, NE along the E coast of Japan, and continuing in an easterly direction into the open Pacific.
- blandishment — the act of blandishing; cajolery
- blanket toss — a game in which a person is repeatedly tossed into the air and caught on an open blanket by a group of people who hold the blanket at its edges and stretch and relax it for each toss and catch.
- blast effect — the damage caused by the force of an explosive blast
- blastocoelic — of or relating to the blastocoel
- blastomycete — any of a genus (Blastomyces) of yeastlike imperfect fungi that cause diseases in people and animals
- blastosphere — blastula
- blatherskite — a talkative silly person
- bletherskate — a blatherer
- blister pack — a type of packet in which small items are displayed and sold, consisting of a transparent dome of plastic or similar material mounted on a firm backing such as cardboard
- bloodstained — Someone or something that is bloodstained is covered with blood.