14-letter words containing a, b, s
- beggar's opera — a ballad opera (1728) with text by John Gay and music arranged by John Pepusch.
- beggar's-ticks — tick trefoil
- belaya tserkov — city in WC Ukraine: pop. 204,000
- belisha beacon — a flashing light in an orange globe mounted on a post, indicating a pedestrian crossing on a road
- belletristical — relating to the fine arts
- bellingshausen — Fabian Gottlieb von [fey-bee-uh n-got-leeb von] /ˈfeɪ bi ənˈgɒt lib vɒn/ (Show IPA), (Faddey Faddeyevich Bellingshauzen) 1778–1852, Russian naval officer and explorer.
- belvoir castle — a castle in Leicestershire, near Grantham (in Lincolnshire): seat of the Dukes of Rutland; rebuilt by James Wyatt in 1816
- benday process — a process for adding tone or shading, as in reproducing drawings, by the overlay on the plate of patterns, as of dots
- beneficialness — the state of being beneficial
- 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
- beta structure — a secondary structure occurring in many proteins, consisting of several polypeptide chains running in parallel or alternating directions and joined by intermolecular hydrogen bonds, creating a flexible, strong arrangement.
- betake oneself — to go; move
- bethlehem sage — a plant, Pulmonaria saccharata, of the borage family, native to Europe, having mottled, white leaves and white or reddish-purple flowers in clusters.
- betray oneself — to reveal one's true character, intentions, etc
- 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.
- bezier surface — (graphics) A surface defined by mathematical formulae, used in computer graphics. A surface P(u, v), where u and v vary orthogonally from 0 to 1 from one edge of the surface to the other, is defined by a set of (n+1)*(m+1) "control points" (X(i, j), Y(i, j), Z(i, j)) for i = 0 to n, j = 0 to m.
- biceps brachii — See under biceps.
- 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.
- bilious attack — a group of symptoms consisting of headache, abdominal pain, and constipation
- billy no-mates — a person with no friends
- binary fission — asexual reproduction in unicellular organisms by division into two daughter cells
- binding strake — a very strong, heavy strake of planking, especially one next to a sheer strake.
- bioaeronautics — the use of aircraft in the discovery, development, and protection of natural and biological resources
- bioinformatics — the branch of information science concerned with large databases of biochemical or pharmaceutical information
- biomathematics — the study of the application of mathematics to biology
- bioregionalism — the conviction that environmental and social policies should be determined by the bioregion rather than economics or politics
- bioregionalist — someone who believes in bioregionalism
- biostatistical — relating to biostatistics
- biosystematics — the study of the variation and evolution of a population of organisms in relation to their taxonomic classification
- biosystematist — someone who studies or works professionally in the field of biosystematics
- bipartisanship — representing, characterized by, or including members from two parties or factions: Government leaders hope to achieve a bipartisan foreign policy.
- bipolarisation — the act of bipolarising
- 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.
- biscuit barrel — an airtight container of circular section equipped with a lid and used for storing biscuits
- bisphosphonate — any drug of a class that inhibits the resorption of bone; used in treating certain bone disorders, esp osteoporosis
- 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.
- bitter cassava — a species of cassava (Manihot esculenta) whose poisonous roots when processed yield tapioca starch
- 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 as night — totally dark
- black basaltes — basaltware.
- black diamonds — carbonado1 .
- black panthers — (in the US) a militant Black political party founded in 1965 to end the political dominance of White people
- black redstart — a small, Passerine bird, Phoenicurus ochruros, found in Central and S Europe
- black sea bass — an American coastal percoid fish, Centropristes striatus, having an elongated body with a long spiny dorsal fin almost divided into two
- black selenium — an allotropic form of selenium occurring as a black, amorphous, water-insoluble, light-sensitive powder: used chiefly in photoelectric cells.