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16-letter words containing a, b, t

  • biotic potential — the capacity of a population of organisms to increase in numbers under optimum environmental conditions.
  • birchbark biting — a Native Canadian craft in which designs are bitten onto bark from birch trees
  • bird in the hand — 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.
  • birthday honours — (in Britain) honorary titles conferred on the official birthday of the sovereign
  • birthday present — a gift given to someone on their birthday
  • birthwort family — the plant family Aristolochiaceae, typified by mostly tropical woody vines and herbaceous plants, having alternate, heart-shaped leaves and flowers lacking true petals but having three petallike sepals, and including the birthwort, Dutchman's-pipe, and wild ginger.
  • bit-mapped image — a computer image that is held in memory as a series of colored dots in a grid, each dot represented by one or more bits.
  • bite one's nails — to chew off the ends of one's fingernails
  • bitterroot range — range of the Rocky Mountains, along the Ida.-Mont. border: highest peak, c. 11,000 ft (3,353 m)
  • black bottom pie — a rich pie with a rum- or whiskey-flavored chocolate filling, often with a crust of crushed gingersnaps, and topped with whipped cream.
  • black nightshade — a poisonous solanaceous plant, Solanum nigrum, a common weed in cultivated land, having small white flowers with backward-curved petals and black berry-like fruits
  • black-letter day — an unlucky or tragic day.
  • black-light trap — a trap for insects that uses ultraviolet light as an attractant.
  • blacktailed deer — a mule deer, esp. the subspecies (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) found from N Calif. to British Columbia
  • blackwater fever — a rare and serious complication of malaria, characterized by massive destruction of red blood cells, producing dark red or blackish urine
  • blasting gelatin — a type of plastic dynamite containing about 7 percent of a cellulose nitrate, used chiefly in underwater work.
  • blink comparator — an optical instrument used to detect small differences in two photographs of the same field or object by viewing them alternately, switching rapidly from one to the other.
  • block and tackle — a hoisting device in which a rope or chain is passed around a pair of blocks containing one or more pulleys. The upper block is secured overhead and the lower block supports the load, the effort being applied to the free end of the rope or chain
  • blow one's stack — to lose one's temper; fly into a rage
  • blue in the face — the pure color of a clear sky; the primary color between green and violet in the visible spectrum, an effect of light with a wavelength between 450 and 500 nm.
  • blue-winged teal — a small North American duck (Anas discors) found on ponds and rivers
  • board and batten — a siding consisting of wide boards or of sheets of plywood set vertically with butt joints covered by battens.
  • boatswain's mate — a job classification in the US navy
  • boatswain's pipe — a whistle used formerly to give orders on board ship
  • bomb calorimeter — a device for determining heats of combustion by igniting a sample in a high pressure of oxygen in a sealed vessel and measuring the resulting rise in temperature: used for measuring the calorific value of foods
  • bonneville flats — an area of salt flats in the W part of Great Salt Lake Desert, in NW Utah: site of automobile speed tests.
  • book of the dead — in ancient Egypt, a book of prayers and charms meant to help the soul in the afterworld
  • boolean-operator — any operation in which each of the operands and the result take one of two values.
  • bootstrap loader — (operating system)   A short program loaded from non-volatile storage and used to bootstrap a computer. On early computers great efforts were expended on making the bootstrap loader short, in order to make it easy to toggle in via the front panel switches. It was just clever enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from punched cards or paper tape), to which it handed control. This program in turn read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer "pulled itself up by its bootstraps" to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap loader is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the "boot block". When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it. A diskless workstation can use bootp to load its OS from the network.
  • bootstrap memory — memory that allows new programs to be entered because some simple preliminary instructions or information are already built in.
  • bordeaux mixture — a fungicide consisting of a solution of equal quantities of copper sulphate and quicklime
  • boston cream pie — a cake of two layers with icing and a creamy filling
  • boston tea party — a raid in 1773 made by citizens of Boston (disguised as Indians) on three British ships in the harbour as a protest against taxes on tea and the monopoly given to the East India Company. The contents of several hundred chests of tea were dumped into the harbour
  • botanical garden — a place where collections of plants and trees are kept for scientific study and exhibition
  • bouillotte table — a small round table of the 18th century, having around its top a gallery within which a bouchon could be set for the playing of card games.
  • boundary dispute — dispute between neighbours about the boundary between their properties
  • bouquet larkspur — a plant, Delphinium grandiflorum, of eastern Asia, having blue or whitish flowers and hairy fruit.
  • bracknell forest — a unitary authority in SE England, in E Berkshire. Pop: 110 100 (2003 est). Area: 109 sq km (42 sq miles)
  • bragg scattering — the diffraction phenomenon exhibited by a crystal bombarded with x-rays in such a way that each plane of the crystal lattice acts as a reflector (Bragg reflector)
  • braking distance — the distance a vehicle travels from the point at which its brakes are applied to the point at which it comes to a stop
  • branchiopneustic — breathing by means of gills, as certain aquatic insect larvae.
  • brand acceptance — the extent to which consumers recognize and welcome a brand
  • brandenburg gate — the only remaining city gate in Berlin, built by Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia in 1788–1791 as a symbol of peace and now one of the city's landmarks
  • brass instrument — a musical wind instrument of brass or other metal with a cup-shaped mouthpiece, as the trombone, tuba, French horn, trumpet, or cornet.
  • brave west winds — the strong west and west-northwest winds blowing between latitudes 40° S and 60° S.
  • bread and butter — Something that is the bread and butter of a person or organization is the activity or work that provides the main part of their income.
  • bread-and-butter — providing a livelihood or basic source of income; supplying the basic needs of life: a bread-and-butter job; the agency's bread-and-butter account.
  • break faith with — If you break faith with someone you made a promise to or something you believed in, you stop acting in a way that supports them.
  • break one's fast — to eat food for the first time after fasting, or for the first time in the day
  • break sb's heart — If something breaks your heart, it makes you feel very sad and depressed, especially because people are suffering but you can do nothing to help them.
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