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19-letter words containing a, d, r, e

  • 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.
  • articulated vehicle — a large vehicle (esp a lorry) made in two separate sections, a tractor and a trailer, connected by a pivoted bar
  • artificial additive — artificial flavouring, colouring or preservatives
  • 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
  • assault and battery — Assault and battery is the crime of attacking someone and causing them physical harm.
  • 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).
  • attendance register — an official list of people who are present at an institution such as a school
  • audio response unit — a device that enables a computer to give a spoken response by generating sounds similar to human speech.
  • auricular appendage — auricle (def 1b).
  • auricular-appendage — Anatomy. the projecting outer portion of the ear; pinna. Also called auricular appendage. an ear-shaped appendage projecting from each atrium of the heart. (loosely) the atrium.
  • 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
  • bacillary dysentery — shigellosis.
  • 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
  • bandar seri begawan — the capital of Brunei. Pop: 64 000 (2005 est)
  • 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
  • batterie de cuisine — cooking utensils collectively; pots and pans, etc
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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-footed ferret — a musteline mammal, Mustela nigripes, of W North America, closely related to the weasels
  • blackfellow's bread — the edible portion of a species of pore fungus, Polyporus mylittae, that occurs in Australia.
  • 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-breasted quail — a small, brightly colored quail, Coturnix chinensis, of southern Asia and Australia, widely kept as a cage bird.
  • 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.
  • brush-tailed possum — any of several widely-distributed Australian possums of the genus Trichosurus
  • buildings insurance — insurance which covers buildings
  • bulbourethral gland — Cowper's gland
  • cable-stayed bridge — a type of suspension bridge in which the supporting cables are connected directly to the bridge deck without the use of suspenders
  • calcium oxychloride — a white powder that decomposes on contact with water and has the characteristic odor of gaseous chlorine: regarded, when dry, as a mixed calcium hypochlorite-chloride, used as a commercial bleach for wood pulp, textiles, oils, and soaps, and in laundering as a decolorizer and disinfectant.
  • cannot very well do — If you say that you cannot very well do something, you mean that it would not be right or possible to do it.
  • capital expenditure — expenditure on acquisitions of or improvements to fixed assets
  • carbon dioxide snow — solid carbon dioxide, used as a refrigerant
  • cat scratch disease — a disorder characterized by fever and swelling of the lymph glands, caused by a viral infection resulting from the scratch or bite of a cat.
  • cat-scratch disease — an ailment characterized by fever and swollen glands and believed to be caused by bacteria transmitted by the scratch or bite of a cat
  • cathodic protection — a technique for protecting metal structures, such as steel ships and pipelines, from electrolytic corrosion by making the structure the cathode in a cell, either by applying an electromotive force directly or by putting it into contact with a more electropositive metal
  • cerebellar syndrome — a disease of the cerebellum characterized by unsteady movements and mispronunciation of words
  • cerebrospinal fluid — the clear colourless fluid in the spaces inside and around the spinal cord and brain
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