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19-letter words containing a, d, o

  • angle of depression — depression (def 11).
  • anno urbis conditae — in a (specified) year from the founding of the city: the ancient Romans reckoned dates from Rome's founding, c. 753 b.c.
  • anterograde amnesia — amnesia caused by brain damage in which the memory loss relates to events occurring after the damage
  • antimony trisulfide — a black or orange-red crystalline compound, Sb2S3, used as a pigment, in pyrotechnics and matches, for fireproofing fabrics and paper, etc.
  • apollonius dyscolus — died a.d. c140, Greek grammarian.
  • apres moi le deluge — after me the deluge
  • aqueduct of sylvius — a canal in the midbrain, connecting the third and fourth ventricles of the brain.
  • armed response unit — (in Britain) a unit of police officers who are trained to use firearms in situations where unarmed police officers would be in danger
  • arsenic trichloride — a colorless or yellow, oily, poisonous liquid, AsCl 3 , used chiefly as an intermediate in the manufacture of organic arsenicals.
  • as old as the hills — very old
  • asbestos cork award — (humour)   Once, long ago at MIT, there was a flamer so consistently obnoxious that another hacker designed, had made, and distributed posters announcing that said flamer had been nominated for the "asbestos cork award". (Any reader in doubt as to the intended application of the cork should consult the etymology under flame.) Since then, it is agreed that only a select few have risen to the heights of bombast required to earn this dubious dignity - but there is no agreement on *which* few.
  • asperger's syndrome — a form of autism in which the person affected has limited but obsessive interests, and has difficulty relating to other people
  • astra digital radio — (audio)   Digital Radio over satellite, compatible with analog television transmissions. Alternatively the normal TV subcarriers can be modulated by a MPEG-1 Layer-2 48 kHz 192 kbps signal. Quality is better than analog carriers and only needs half the bandwidth (analog stereo = 2 carrier, digital stereo = 1 carrier). Quality is limited and the data rate can't be increased.
  • at one's discretion — as one wishes
  • attachment disorder — an emotional and behavioral disorder arising from a failure to form a strong bond with one’s primary caregiver in early childhood and affecting one’s social relationships in later childhood and adulthood. See also attachment (def 3a).
  • audio response unit — a device that enables a computer to give a spoken response by generating sounds similar to human speech.
  • augmented cognition — the study of the augmenting of human mental functions by computer programs
  • avogadro's constant — the number of atoms or molecules in a mole of a substance, equal to 6.022 52 × 1023
  • baader-meinhof gang — a group of left-wing West German terrorists, active in the 1970s, who were dedicated to the violent overthrow of capitalist society
  • backward compatible — backward compatibility
  • backward somersault — a somersault performed in a backward direction with the legs leading the rest of the body
  • balfour declaration — the statement made by Arthur Balfour in 1917 of British support for the setting up of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, provided that the rights of "existing non-Jewish communities" in Palestine could be safeguarded
  • ballistocardiograph — an instrument that records the slight recoil of the body, while on a special bed, caused by the contractions of the heart: used to measure cardiac pumping power and the elasticity of the aorta
  • balsam woolly aphid — any plant louse of the family Aphididae, characterized by a waxy secretion that appears like a jumbled mass of fine, curly, white cottony or woolly threads, as Eriosoma lanigerum (woolly apple aphid or American blight) and Prociphilus tessellatus (woolly alder aphid)
  • barbados gooseberry — Also called lemon vine. a treelike cactus, Pereskia aculeata, of tropical America, characterized by broad, elliptical leaves and spiny stems bearing a yellow, edible fruit.
  • barometric gradient — pressure gradient
  • battle-ground state — a state of the U.S. in which the Democratic and Republican candidates both have a good chance of winning and that is considered key to the outcome of a presidential election: the swing states of Ohio and Indiana.
  • baudotbetical order — (algorithm)   /baw do bet' i k*l/ Sorted into an order where numerics and special characters are intermixed by sorting a 5-bit Baudot code file ignoring the numeric shift and unshift codes.
  • be liable to do sth — When something is liable to happen, it is very likely to happen.
  • behavioral medicine — an interdisciplinary field that uses the concepts and techniques of the behavioral sciences to improve physical and emotional health.
  • below par/under par — If you feel below par or under par, you feel tired and unable to perform as well as you normally do.
  • bend over backwards — to make a special effort, esp in order to please
  • benzylidene acetone — a colorless, crystalline, water-insoluble solid, C 10 H 10 O, having a vanillalike odor, used chiefly as a scent in the manufacture of perfume.
  • bicarbonate of soda — Bicarbonate of soda is a white powder which is used in baking to make cakes rise, and also as a medicine for your stomach.
  • big-leaved magnolia — evergreen magnolia.
  • bilingual education — schooling in which those not fluent in the standard or national language are taught in their own language.
  • binding arbitration — dispute resolution
  • binocular disparity — the small differences in the positions of the parts of the images falling on each eye that results when each eye views the scene from a slightly different position; these differences make stereoscopic vision possible
  • bit-paired keyboard — (hardware)   (Obsolete, or "bit-shift keyboard") A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed. In order to avoid making the thing more of a Rube Goldberg kluge than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the same basic bit pattern on one key. Looking at the ASCII chart, we find: high low bits bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 010 ! " # $ % & ' ( ) 011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). This was *not* the weirdest variant of the QWERTY layout widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029 card punches. When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, there was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product look like an office typewriter. These alternatives became known as "bit-paired" and "typewriter-paired" keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical - and because most hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was little pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter standard. The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The "typewriter-paired" standard became universal, "bit-paired" hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse.
  • black-billed cuckoo — a black-billed North American cuckoo, Coccyzus erythropthalmus, that, unlike most cuckoos, constructs its own nest and rears its own young.
  • black-footed ferret — a musteline mammal, Mustela nigripes, of W North America, closely related to the weasels
  • black-tailed godwit — a large wading bird with a very long beak, Limosa limosa, found in W and Central Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia
  • blackfellow's bread — the edible portion of a species of pore fungus, Polyporus mylittae, that occurs in Australia.
  • blind carbon (copy) — a carbon copy of a letter sent to someone other than the addressee, with no indication on the original letter that such a copy has been sent
  • blood alcohol level — the amount of alcohol in someone's blood
  • blood-brain barrier — the barrier created by the walls of the capillaries of the brain that prevents certain substances, as most proteins and drugs, from passing from the blood into the brain tissue and cerebrospinal fluid
  • blue-tongued lizard — a large Australian lizard, Tiliqua scincoides, characterized by having a cobalt-blue tongue.
  • board certification — the process of certifying that a physician has passed an examination and met the standards of a professional organization representing a particular medical specialty.
  • board of trade unit — a unit of electrical energy equal to 1 kilowatt-hour
  • boat-tailed grackle — a large grackle, Quiscalus major, of the southeastern U.S., that folds its tail into a shape resembling the keel of a boat.
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