12-letter words containing a, l, b, c
- branch plant — a plant or factory in Canada belonging to a company whose headquarters are in another country
- brass-collar — unwaveringly faithful to a political party; voting the straight ticket: a brass-collar Democrat.
- breechloader — any gun loaded at the breech
- brown hackle — an artificial fly having a peacock herl body, golden tag and tail, and brown hackle.
- bubble dance — a solo dance by a nude or nearly nude woman, as in a burlesque show, using one or more balloons for covering.
- buccolingual — of or relating to the cheek and tongue.
- bulk carrier — a ship that carries unpackaged cargo, usually consisting of a single dry commodity, such as coal or grain
- bullock cart — a cart pulled by one or two bullocks
- cabalistical — cabalistic
- cabbage palm — a West Indian palm, Roystonea (or Oreodoxa) oleracea, whose leaf buds are eaten like cabbage
- cable length — a unit of length in nautical use that has various values, including 100 fathoms (600 feet)
- cable stitch — a pattern or series of knitting stitches producing a design like a twisted rope
- cable-laying — involved in or connected to the activity of laying cables
- cable-stitch — a series of stitches used in knitting to produce a cable effect.
- cablecasting — relating to broadcasting by cable
- cabriole leg — a type of furniture leg, popular in the first half of the 18th century, in which an upper convex curve descends tapering to a concave curve
- cactoblastis — a moth, Cactoblastis cactorum of South America, that was introduced into Australia to act as a biological control on the prickly pear
- calabar bean — the dark brown very poisonous seed of a leguminous woody climbing plant, Physostigma venenosum, of tropical Africa, used as a source of the drug physostigmine
- calabrasella — a card game for three persons that is played with a 40-card pack made by removing the eights, nines, and tens from a regular 52-card pack.
- calculatable — Able to be calculated; calculable.
- calibrations — Plural form of calibration.
- call-by-name — (reduction) (CBN) (Normal order reduction, leftmost, outermost reduction). An argument passing convention (first provided by ALGOL 60?) where argument expressions are passed unevaluated. This is usually implemented by passing a pointer to a thunk - some code which will return the value of the argument and an environment giving the values of its free variables. This evaluation strategy is guaranteed to reach a normal form if one exists. When used to implement functional programming languages, call-by-name is usually combined with graph reduction to avoid repeated evaluation of the same expression. This is then known as call-by-need. The opposite of call-by-name is call-by-value where arguments are evaluated before they are passed to a function. This is more efficient but is less likely to terminate in the presence of infinite data structures and recursive functions. Arguments to macros are usually passed using call-by-name.
- call-by-need — (reduction) A reduction strategy which delays evaluation of function arguments until their values are needed. A value is needed if it is an argument to a primitive function or it is the condition in a conditional. Call-by-need is one aspect of lazy evaluation. The term first appears in Chris Wadsworth's thesis "Semantics and Pragmatics of the Lambda calculus" (Oxford, 1971, p. 183). It was used later, by J. Vuillemin in his thesis (Stanford, 1973).
- camphor ball — mothball
- cannibalised — Simple past tense and past participle of cannibalise.
- cannibalized — Simple past tense and past participle of cannibalize.
- cannibalizes — Third-person singular simple present indicative form of cannibalize.
- cannonballed — Simple past tense and past participle of cannonball.
- capabilities — the quality of being capable; capacity; ability: His capability was unquestionable.
- cape buffalo — a large, black, nearly hairless, very fierce buffalo (Syncerus caffer) of South Africa, with horns joined at the bases to form a helmetlike structure
- capped elbow — a swelling of the elbow of a horse due to irritation caused by the hoof striking the elbow when lying down.
- carbamylurea — biuret.
- carbocholine — carbachol.
- carbon black — a black finely divided form of amorphous carbon produced by incomplete combustion of natural gas or petroleum: used to reinforce rubber and in the manufacture of pigments and ink
- carbon cycle — the circulation of carbon between living organisms and their surroundings. Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is synthesized by plants into plant tissue, which is ingested and metabolized by animals and converted to carbon dioxide again during respiration and decay
- carbon steel — steel whose characteristics are determined by the amount of carbon it contains
- carbon value — an empirical measurement of the tendency of a lubricant to form carbon when in use
- carboxylated — Simple past tense and past participle of carboxylate.
- carnal abuse — Law. any lascivious contact with the sexual organs of a child by an adult, especially without sexual intercourse.
- carolina bay — any of the shallow, usually marshy, oval depressions found in the coastal plains of the eastern U.S. that are heavily forested and have rich soil.
- carriageable — (of a road, etc) able to be travelled in a carriage
- carvel-built — (of a vessel) having a hull with planks made flush at the seams
- cassel brown — Vandyke brown.
- cavity block — a precast concrete block that contains a cavity or cavities
- cebocephalic — Exhibiting or relating to cebocephaly.
- celebrations — Plural form of celebration.
- celebreality — a television genre that is unscripted and involves either the day-to-day documentation of a celebrity’s life or competitive challenges that a celebrity or celebrities must perform
- celebutantes — Plural form of celebutante.
- celibatarian — inclined towards or characterized by celibacy
- central bank — a national bank that does business mainly with a government and with other banks: it regulates the volume and cost of credit