12-letter words containing a, e, g
- belly-aching — Informal. a pain in the abdomen or bowels.
- belt highway — beltway (def 1).
- benchmarking — In business, benchmarking is a process in which a company compares its products and methods with those of the most successful companies in its field, in order to try to improve its own performance.
- bengal light — a firework or flare that burns with a steady bright blue light, formerly used as a signal
- bengal tiger — a large tiger found in S. Asia
- benzal group — the bivalent group C 7 H 6 –, derived from benzaldehyde.
- bermuda high — a subtropical high centered near Bermuda.
- 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.
- bible banger — Bible-thumper.
- bible-banger — Bible-thumper.
- biflagellate — having two flagella
- 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
- binge eating — the practice of eating excessive amounts of food over a short period of time
- bingo caller — the person who shouts out the numbers to bingo players
- biogeography — the branch of biology concerned with the geographical distribution of plants and animals
- biomagnetics — the study of magnetic fields as a form of therapy
- biomagnetism — animal magnetism.
- biscay green — a yellowish green.
- 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.
- black grouse — a large N European grouse, Lyrurus tetrix, the male of which has a bluish-black plumage and lyre-shaped tail
- black plague — Great Plague.
- black tongue — canine pellagra.
- black-figure — pertaining to or designating a style of vase painting developed in Greece in the 7th and 6th centuries b.c., chiefly characterized by silhouetted figures painted in black slip on a red clay body, details incised into the design, and a two-dimensional structure of form and space.
- blaze orange — a very bright orange, as on a traffic cone.
- blind flange — a disk for closing the end of a pipe, having holes for bolting it to a flange.
- blood orange — a variety of orange all or part of the pulp of which is dark red when ripe
- bloomingdale — a town in NE Illinois.
- blues guitar — blues guitar music
- bluesnarfing — the practice of using one Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone to steal contact details, ring tones, images, etc from another
- boating lake — a lake in a park where rowing boats can be hired
- bog asphodel — either of two liliaceous plants, Narthecium ossifragum of Europe or N. americanum of North America, that grow in boggy places and have small yellow flowers and grasslike leaves
- bog of allen — a region of peat bogs in central Ireland, west of Dublin. Area: over 10 sq km (3.75 sq miles)
- bog rosemary — any of several species (genus Andromeda) of evergreen shrubs of the heath family, native to cold bogs of North America and Europe, with pink flowers and narrow leaves
- boghead coal — compact bituminous coal that burns brightly and yields large quantities of tar and oil upon distillation.
- boilermaking — metal-working in heavy industry; plating or welding
- bombe glacée — a dessert of ice cream lined or filled with custard, cake crumbs, etc
- bonnet glass — monteith (def 2).
- bonnet-glass — a large punch bowl, usually of silver, having a notched rim for suspending punch cups.
- boogie board — a small, flexible plastic surfboard, ridden lying down.
- boolean ring — a nonempty collection of sets having the properties that the union of two sets of the collection is a set in the collection and that the relative complement of each set with respect to any other set is in the collection.
- boomeranging — a bent or curved piece of tough wood used by the Australian Aborigines as a throwing club, one form of which can be thrown so as to return to the thrower.
- bootleg play — a play in which the quarterback pretends to hand the ball to a teammate, hides it by placing it next to his hip, and runs with it.
- border guard — a guard stationed on a border between countries
- bottle glass — glass used for making bottles, consisting of a silicate of sodium, calcium, and aluminium
- bougainville — an island in the W Pacific, in Papua New Guinea: the largest of the Solomon Islands: unilaterally declared independence in 1990; occupied by government troops in 1992, and granted autonomy in 2001. Chief town: Kieta. Area: 10 049 sq km (3880 sq miles)
- boulangerite — a bluish lead-gray mineral, lead antimony sulfide, Pb 5 Sb 4 S 11 , a minor ore of lead.
- bound charge — any electric charge that is bound to an atom or molecule (opposed to free charge).
- box magazine — a rectangular cartridge holder in a submachine or light machine gun.
- boxgrove man — a type of primitive man, probably Homo heidelbergensis, and probably dating from the Middle Palaeolithic period some 500 000 years ago; remains were found at Boxgrove in West Sussex in 1993 and 1995
- brain damage — If someone suffers brain damage, their brain is damaged by an illness or injury so that they cannot function normally.