18-letter words containing b, a, l, s, u
- hawksbill (turtle) — a medium-sized marine turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata, family Cheloniidae) having a hawklike beak and a horny shell from which tortoise shell is obtained
- hydrofluorocarbons — Plural form of hydrofluorocarbon.
- incommensurability — not commensurable; having no common basis, measure, or standard of comparison.
- insurable interest — a financial or other interest in the life or property covered by an insurance contract, without which the contract cannot be enforced
- kentucky bluegrass — a grass, Poa pratensis, of the Mississippi valley, used for pasturage and lawns.
- last but not least — lastly
- lonely hearts club — a club for people who are trying to find a lover or a friend
- lubber grasshopper — plains grasshopper.
- malpighian tubules — one of a group of long, slender excretory tubules at the anterior end of the hindgut in insects and other terrestrial arthropods.
- multicast backbone — (MBONE) A virtual network on top of the Internet which supports routing of IP multicast packets, intended for multimedia transmission. MBONE gives public access desktop video communications. The quality is poor with only 3-5 frames per second instead of the 30 frames per second of commercial television. Its advantage is that it avoids all telecommunications costs normally associated with teleconferencing. An interesting innovation is the use of MBONE for audio communications and an electronic "whiteboard" where the computer screen becomes a shared workspace where two physically remote parties can draw on and edit shared documents in real-time.
- nebular hypothesis — the theory that the solar system evolved from a mass of nebular matter: prominent in the 19th century following its precise formulation by Laplace.
- non-understandable — capable of being understood; comprehensible.
- oblique-slip fault — a fault on which the movement is along both the strike and the dip of the fault
- passive vocabulary — all the words, collectively, that a person can understand
- payment by results — a system of wage payment whereby all or part of the wage varies systematically according to the level of work performance of an employee
- personal bodyguard — a person employed to protect a particular person
- play silly buggers — to fool around and waste time
- plumber's merchant — a shop or business that sells things needed for the job of installing and repairing pipes, fixtures, etc, for water, drainage, and gas
- publishing company — a firm which publishes books
- pulmonary embolism — the blockage of a pulmonary artery, often by a blood clot, that stops the flow of blood to the lungs and which can result in death if untreated
- rheims-douay bible — Douay Bible.
- run in sb's family — If a characteristic runs in someone's family, it often occurs in members of that family, in different generations.
- separate but equal — pertaining to a racial policy, formerly practiced in some parts of the United States, by which black people could be segregated if granted equal opportunities and facilities, as for education, transportation, or jobs.
- seven-league boots — mythical boots that allowed the wearer to travel seven leagues (a former unit of measurement), ie a great length, at each step
- sub-classification — to arrange in subclasses.
- subatomic particle — physics:
- subliminal message — a message passed to the human mind without the mind being consciously aware of it, as, for example, in advertising
- submaxillary gland — submandibular gland.
- subordinate clause — a clause that modifies the principal clause or some part of it or that serves a noun function in the principal clause, as when she arrived in the sentence I was there when she arrived or that she has arrived in the sentence I doubt that she has arrived.
- supraorbital ridge — browridge.
- talk a blue streak — speak rapidly and incessantly
- the blue hen state — a nickname for the state of Delaware
- the-master-builder — a play (1892) by Ibsen.
- to bare one's soul — If you bare your soul, you tell someone your most secret thoughts and feelings.
- universal debugger — (tool, parallel) (udb) KSR's interactive source level debugger for serial and parallel programs written in KSR, Fortran, KSR C and KSR1 assembly language. Udb is a source level debugger for testing and debugging serial and parallel programs; it is compatible with GDB and dbx. The user can direct udb either by typing commands or graphically through an X-based window interface; the latter provides simultaneous display of source code, I/O and instructions. For parallel programs, operations can be carried out per-thread.
- universalizability — the thesis that any moral judgment must be equally applicable to every relevantly identical situation
- up to the eyeballs — You use up to the eyeballs to emphasize that someone is in an undesirable state to a very great degree.