12-letter words containing a, n, y, b
- black bryony — a climbing herbaceous Eurasian plant, Tamus communis, having small greenish flowers and poisonous red berries: family Dioscoreaceae
- black canyon — a canyon of the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada: site of Boulder Dam.
- body scanner — a machine using X-rays and a computer, used in medicine to look for signs of disease, or in security operations to look for drugs, weapons, etc
- bodyboarding — the sport of surfing using a bodyboard
- bonnyclabber — clotted or curdled milk
- brachycranic — having a cranial index of 81.0–85.4.
- bradykinesia — abnormal slowness of physical movement, esp as an effect of Parkinson's disease
- bradykinetic — slowness of movement, as found, for example, in Parkinson's disease.
- bring to bay — to force into a position from which retreat is impossible
- bunny rabbit — rabbit
- buoyancy aid — a type of usually foam-filled lifejacket designed for use in sports such as canoeing
- 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 any means — in any way possible; at all; somehow
- by reason of — If one thing happens by reason of another, it happens because of it.
- 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
- 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).
- cam ranh bay — an inlet of the South China Sea, on the SE coast of Vietnam: U. S. military facility during the Vietnam War.
- 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
- cardigan bay — an inlet of St George's Channel, on the W coast of Wales
- 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.
- carry-on bag — a small bag that is taken inside an aircraft by hand personally by a passenger
- chimneyboard — a partition or a cover to shut off a fireplace
- circumbinary — (astronomy) Of, pertaining to, or having an orbit around a binary star.
- cleanability — the ability to be cleaned
- communicably — capable of being easily communicated or transmitted: communicable information; a communicable disease.
- concubitancy — a custom requiring marriage between two people, esp a custom requiring a woman to marry her husband's brother on her husband's death
- connubiality — of marriage or wedlock; matrimonial; conjugal: connubial love.
- conscionably — being in conformity with one's conscience; just.
- considerably — to a noteworthy or marked extent; much; noticeably; substantially; amply.
- constabulary — In Britain and some other countries, a constabulary is the police force of a particular area.
- contributary — contributory
- controllably — to exercise restraint or direction over; dominate; command: The car is difficult to control at high speeds. That zone is controlled by enemy troops.
- countability — the fact of being countable
- county board — the governing body of a U.S. county consisting usually of three or more elected members.
- currency bar — a long narrow iron bar, often sword-like or spear-like in shape, dating from the pre-Roman and Roman period in Britain; the purpose of currency bars is not certain, and while they may have been used in trade, they may have had a ritual significance
- cyber monday — the Monday after Thanksgiving, one of the busiest online shopping days.
- cybercasting — the broadcasting of news, entertainment, etc., using the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web.
- cyberloafing — (informal) The use of computers by employees for purposes unrelated to work.
- cybernetical — of or relating to cybernetics
- cytomembrane — a membrane around a cell that encloses cytoplasm and acts as a semi-permeable barrier
- definability — The quality of being definable.
- demonstrably — capable of being demonstrated or proved.
- determinably — In a determinable way.
- detonability — the quality of being detonable
- dishonorably — In a dishonorable manner.
- drinkability — The state or property of being drinkable.
- dynamic dbms — dynamic database management system