12-letter words containing a, l, e, y
- battleworthy — capable of engaging in combat; ready for battle: a decline in the nation's battleworthy forces.
- bayonet bulb — an electric light bulb which is inserted into the socket against spring pressure and turned so that pins on its side engage in slots in the socket
- bearded lady — a woman with a beard, esp in a circus or freakshow
- beatifically — bestowing bliss, blessings, happiness, or the like: beatific peace.
- beauty salon — A beauty salon is the same as a beauty parlour.
- beauty sleep — sleep, esp sleep before midnight
- bedraggledly — In a bedraggled manner.
- behaviorally — manner of behaving or acting.
- belaying pin — a cylindrical, sometimes tapered pin, usually of metal or wood, that fits into a hole in a pin or fife rail: used for belaying
- bell's palsy — a usually temporary paralysis of the muscles of the face, normally on one side
- belly dancer — A belly dancer is a woman who performs a Middle Eastern dance in which she moves her hips and abdomen about.
- belly-aching — Informal. a pain in the abdomen or bowels.
- belt highway — beltway (def 1).
- beneficially — conferring benefit; advantageous; helpful: the beneficial effect of sunshine.
- benzaldehyde — a yellowish fragrant volatile oil occurring in almond kernels and used in the manufacture of dyes, perfumes, and flavourings and as a solvent for oils and resins. Formula: C6H5CHO
- bermuda lily — a lily, Lilium longiflorum eximium, having white, funnel-shaped flowers, cultivated especially as an Easter lily.
- bi-quarterly — occurring twice in each quarter of a year.
- bicarpellary — (of an ovary) having two carpels
- bicycle path — a path designed for bicyclists
- bicycle race — cycling (def 2).
- bicycle rack — a metal frame for securing bicycles when they are not in use
- biparentally — from a biparental point of view
- black beauty — a Biphetamine capsule.
- black cherry — a tree of the species Prunus serotina, having a small fleshy rounded edible fruit containing a hard stone
- black comedy — a comedy dealing with an unpleasant situation in a pessimistic or macabre manner
- blastomycete — any of a genus (Blastomyces) of yeastlike imperfect fungi that cause diseases in people and animals
- blue-sky law — a state law regulating the trading of securities: intended to protect investors from fraud
- bonnyclabber — clotted or curdled milk
- 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.
- bottle party — a party to which guests bring drink
- boulder clay — an unstratified glacial deposit consisting of fine clay, boulders, and pebbles
- brachycephal — a person with a brachycephalic head
- brambleberry — the fruit of a bramble.
- breathalyser — a device for estimating the amount of alcohol in the breath: used in testing people suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol
- breathalyzer — A Breathalyzer is a bag or electronic device that the police use to test whether a driver has drunk too much alcohol.
- breathlessly — without breath or breathing with difficulty; gasping; panting: We were breathless after the steep climb.
- buffaloberry — any shrub of the genus Shepherdia native to North America
- bushy-tailed — bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, fresh, alert, eager, and lively
- by all means — You can say 'by all means' to tell someone that you are very willing to allow them to do something.
- by and large — You use by and large to indicate that a statement is mostly but not completely true.
- by the balls — so as to be rendered powerless
- by wholesale — at wholesale
- byelorussian — Byelorussian means belonging or relating to Byelorussia or to its people or culture.
- cable-laying — involved in or connected to the activity of laying cables
- cadaverously — In a cadaverous manner.
- calcareously — in a calcareous manner
- calculatedly — in a calculated manner
- calendar day — the period from one midnight to the following midnight.
- 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).