14-letter words containing a, t, o, r
- auditory canal — the narrow passageway from the outer ear to the eardrum.
- auditory nerve — either of the eighth pair of cranial nerves, which connect the ear with the brain and carry impulses relating to sound and balance
- auger-electron — a nonradiative process in which an atom in an excited state undergoes a transition to a lower state by the emission of a bound electron (Auger electron) rather than by the emission of an x-ray.
- aurothiomalate — (chemistry) A thiomalate with the addition of gold.
- austro-asiatic — a hypothetical phylum or superfamily of languages consisting of Mon-Khmer and certain other languages of India and South-East Asia. Links with Malayo-Polynesian have also been suggested
- author catalog — a catalog whose entries are listed by author, editor, compiler, translator, or other party considered to have responsibility for the creation or assembly of the work specified.
- authorisations — Plural form of authorisation.
- authoritarians — Plural form of authoritarian.
- authority file — a file, either on cards or in machine-readable format, in which decisions involving bibliographic records, particularly for form of entry, are recorded to establish a precedent or rule for subsequent decisions and to provide for consistency of entries.
- authorizations — Plural form of authorization.
- autobiographer — a person who writes the story of his or her own life
- autobiographic — marked by or dealing with one's own experiences or life history; of or in the manner of an autobiography: autobiographical material; an autobiographical novel.
- autocollimator — an instrument combining the functions of a telescope and collimator, for detecting and measuring very small deviations in a beam of light.
- autocoprophagy — the consumption of one's own faeces
- autocorrelator — (electronics) A device that modifies a signal with a delayed copy of itself in order to detect any periodic signal hidden in the noise.
- autocovariance — (statistics) The covariance of a signal with another part of the same signal.
- autocratically — In an autocratic manner.
- autodestructed — Simple past tense and past participle of autodestruct.
- autoenrollment — Automatic enrollment (especially of security certificates in a computer system).
- automatic door — a self-opening door
- autoradiograph — a photograph showing the distribution of a radioactive substance in a specimen. The photographic plate is exposed by radiation from the specimen
- autoreactivity — (immunology) The condition of being autoreactive.
- autoregression — (mathematics) An autoregressive process that is used to model many types of natural behaviour.
- autoregressive — (statistics) Employing autoregression, using a weighted sample of past data to predict future results.
- autoregulation — the continual automatic adjustment or self-regulation of a biochemical, physiological, or ecological system to maintain a stable state.
- autoresponders — Plural form of autoresponder.
- autotetraploid — an individual or strain whose chromosome complement consists of four copies of a single genome due to doubling of an ancestral chromosome complement
- autotransplant — autograft.
- autotypography — a process in which drawings are executed on gelatin before being impressed on a soft metal plate to allow for printing
- auxiliary note — a nonharmonic note occurring between two harmonic notes
- auxiliary tone — a melodic ornamental tone following a principal tone by a step above or below and returning to the principal tone; embellishment.
- avalokitesvara — a male Bodhisattva, widely revered and identified with various persons and gods.
- axis-ordinates — y-axis (def 1).
- bachelor chest — a chest of drawers, esp., one for men's shirts, sweaters, underwear, etc.
- bachelor party — A bachelor party is a party for a man who is getting married very soon, to which only men are invited.
- back and forth — If someone moves back and forth, they repeatedly move in one direction and then in the opposite direction.
- back formation — the invention of a new word on the assumption that a familiar word is derived from it. The verbs edit and burgle were so created from editor and burglar
- back to nature — If you want to get back to nature, you want to return to a simpler way of living.
- back-and-forth — backward and forward; side to side; to and fro: a back-and-forth shuttling of buses to the stadium; the back-and-forth movement of a clock's pendulum.
- back-formation — the analogical creation of one word from another word that appears to be a derived or inflected form of the first by dropping the apparent affix or by modification.
- backside-front — backend-to.
- backstrap loom — a simple horizontal loom, used especially in Central and South America, on which one of two beams holding the warp yarn is attached to a strap that passes across the weaver's back.
- bacteriologist — a branch of microbiology dealing with the identification, study, and cultivation of bacteria and with their applications in medicine, agriculture, industry, and biotechnology.
- bacteriophages — Plural form of bacteriophage.
- bacteriostasis — inhibition of the growth and reproduction of bacteria, esp by the action of a chemical agent
- bacteriostatic — the prevention of the further growth of bacteria.
- ball indicator — a flight instrument that measures the angle of roll about an aircraft's horizontal axis, thereby indicating whether or not the aircraft is skidding or slipping.
- ballot rigging — Ballot rigging is the act of illegally changing the result of an election by producing a false record of the number of votes.
- baltimore chop — a batted ball that takes a high bounce upon hitting the ground on or immediately in front of home plate, often enabling the batter to reach first base safely.
- bamboo curtain — (esp in the 1950s and 1960s) the political and military barrier to communications around the People's Republic of China