16-letter words containing a, r, t, s
- back-seat driver — If you refer to a passenger in a car as a back-seat driver, they annoy you because they constantly give you advice.
- balance transfer — the act of transferring debt from one credit card to another, assuming that the second card has better terms or interest rates than the first
- ballast resistor — ballast (def 5a).
- ballast-resistor — Nautical. any heavy material carried temporarily or permanently in a vessel to provide desired draft and stability.
- ballistic camera — a camera for tracking missiles launched at night.
- baluster measure — an antique liquid measure usually made of pewter, having a concave top on a convex base.
- band-pass filter — a filter that transmits only those currents having a frequency lying within specified limits
- barbecue stopper — a controversial current-affairs issue
- bare necessities — only the essentials
- bargain basement — If you refer to something as a bargain basement thing, you mean that it is cheap and not very good quality.
- bargain-basement — very low-priced.
- baron tweedsmuir — the title of Scottish novelist John Buchan
- bartholomeu dias — Bartholomeu [bahr-too-loo-me-oo] /ˌbɑr tʊ lʊˈmɛ ʊ/ (Show IPA), c1450–1500, Portuguese navigator: discoverer of the Cape of Good Hope.
- basic dichromate — an orange-red, amorphous, water-insoluble powder, Bi 2 O 3 ⋅2CrO 3 , used chiefly as a pigment in paints.
- bastard culverin — a 16th-century cannon, smaller than a culverin, firing a shot of between 5 and 8 pounds (11 and 17.6 kg).
- bastard daughter — an illegitimate daughter
- bastard mahogany — an Australian tree, Eucalyptus botryoides, of the myrtle family, having lance-shaped leaves and furrowed bark.
- bastard pointing — an imitation of tuck pointing, having a fillet made from the mortar of the joint.
- bastard toadflax — any of several low-growing, often parasitic plants of the genus Comandra, having alternate leaves and clusters of small whitish flowers.
- batch processing — manufacturing products or treating materials in batches, by passing the output of one process to subsequent processes
- batesian mimicry — mimicry in which a harmless species is protected from predators by means of its resemblance to a harmful or inedible species
- bearing pedestal — an independent support for a bearing, usually incorporating a bearing housing
- bearish tendency — a tendency for share prices to fall
- beauty therapist — a person whose job is to carry out treatments to improve a person's appearance, such as facials, manicures, removal of unwanted hair, etc
- beaux' stratagem — a comedy (1707) by George Farquhar.
- belted-bias tire — a motor-vehicle tire of the same construction as a bias-ply tire but with an added belt of steel or a strong synthetic material under the tread.
- bertrand russell — (person) (1872-1970) A British mathematician, the discoverer of Russell's paradox.
- best-before date — a date on packaged food indicating how long it is safe to keep it
- beta abstraction — [lambda-calculus] The conversion of an expression to an application of a lambda abstraction to an argument expression. Some subterm of the original expression becomes the argument of the abstraction and the rest becomes its body. E.g. 4+1 --> (\ x . x+1) 4 The opposite of beta abstraction is beta reduction. These are the two kinds of beta conversion.
- bias-belted tire — belted-bias tire.
- bimetallic strip — a strip consisting of two metals of different coefficients of expansion welded together so that it buckles on heating: used in thermostats, etc
- birthday honours — (in Britain) honorary titles conferred on the official birthday of the sovereign
- birthday present — a gift given to someone on their birthday
- bootstrap loader — (operating system) A short program loaded from non-volatile storage and used to bootstrap a computer. On early computers great efforts were expended on making the bootstrap loader short, in order to make it easy to toggle in via the front panel switches. It was just clever enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from punched cards or paper tape), to which it handed control. This program in turn read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer "pulled itself up by its bootstraps" to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap loader is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the "boot block". When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it. A diskless workstation can use bootp to load its OS from the network.
- bootstrap memory — memory that allows new programs to be entered because some simple preliminary instructions or information are already built in.
- boston cream pie — a cake of two layers with icing and a creamy filling
- boston tea party — a raid in 1773 made by citizens of Boston (disguised as Indians) on three British ships in the harbour as a protest against taxes on tea and the monopoly given to the East India Company. The contents of several hundred chests of tea were dumped into the harbour
- boundary dispute — dispute between neighbours about the boundary between their properties
- bouquet larkspur — a plant, Delphinium grandiflorum, of eastern Asia, having blue or whitish flowers and hairy fruit.
- bracknell forest — a unitary authority in SE England, in E Berkshire. Pop: 110 100 (2003 est). Area: 109 sq km (42 sq miles)
- bragg scattering — the diffraction phenomenon exhibited by a crystal bombarded with x-rays in such a way that each plane of the crystal lattice acts as a reflector (Bragg reflector)
- braking distance — the distance a vehicle travels from the point at which its brakes are applied to the point at which it comes to a stop
- branchiopneustic — breathing by means of gills, as certain aquatic insect larvae.
- brass instrument — a musical wind instrument of brass or other metal with a cup-shaped mouthpiece, as the trombone, tuba, French horn, trumpet, or cornet.
- brave west winds — the strong west and west-northwest winds blowing between latitudes 40° S and 60° S.
- break one's fast — to eat food for the first time after fasting, or for the first time in the day
- break sb's heart — If something breaks your heart, it makes you feel very sad and depressed, especially because people are suffering but you can do nothing to help them.
- breakfast cereal — a type of food made from a cereal plant and commonly eaten at breakfast
- breast screening — a radiological or other examination of a woman's breasts to check for signs of cancer
- breath freshener — a mint or other sweet that one can suck or chew to release a scent that freshens the breath