12-letter words containing b, a, n
- cabinet wine — cabinet (def 10).
- cabinet-wine — a piece of furniture with shelves, drawers, etc., for holding or displaying items: a curio cabinet; a file cabinet.
- cabinetmaker — A cabinetmaker is a person who makes high-quality wooden furniture.
- cable length — a unit of length in nautical use that has various values, including 100 fathoms (600 feet)
- cable-laying — involved in or connected to the activity of laying cables
- cablecasting — relating to broadcasting by cable
- cadet branch — the family or family branch of a younger son
- calabar bean — the dark brown very poisonous seed of a leguminous woody climbing plant, Physostigma venenosum, of tropical Africa, used as a source of the drug physostigmine
- calibrations — Plural form of calibration.
- 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.
- camp bastion — a large British military base in Helmand province, Afghanistan, built in 2006
- cancerphobia — an excessive fear of getting cancer
- cannabinoids — Plural form of cannabinoid.
- cannibalised — Simple past tense and past participle of cannibalise.
- cannibalized — Simple past tense and past participle of cannibalize.
- cannibalizes — Third-person singular simple present indicative form of cannibalize.
- cannonballed — Simple past tense and past participle of cannonball.
- cantabrigian — of, relating to, or characteristic of Cambridge or Cambridge University, or of Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Harvard University
- canterburies — Plural form of canterbury.
- carbocations — Plural form of carbocation.
- carbocholine — carbachol.
- carbon black — a black finely divided form of amorphous carbon produced by incomplete combustion of natural gas or petroleum: used to reinforce rubber and in the manufacture of pigments and ink
- carbon brush — a small block of carbon used to convey current between the stationary and moving parts of an electric generator, motor, etc
- 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
- carbon fiber — a very strong, lightweight synthetic fiber used in protective clothing, spacecraft components, racing shells, etc.
- carbon fibre — a black silky thread of pure carbon made by heating and stretching textile fibres and used because of its lightness and strength at high temperatures for reinforcing resins, ceramics, and metals, esp in turbine blades and for fishing rods
- carbon paper — Carbon paper is thin paper with a dark substance on one side. You use it to make copies of letters, bills, and other papers.
- carbon steel — steel whose characteristics are determined by the amount of carbon it contains
- carbon value — an empirical measurement of the tendency of a lubricant to form carbon when in use
- carbonaceous — of, resembling, or containing carbon
- carbonadoing — Present participle of carbonado.
- carbonatites — Plural form of carbonatite.
- cardigan bay — an inlet of St George's Channel, on the W coast of Wales
- carnal abuse — Law. any lascivious contact with the sexual organs of a child by an adult, especially without sexual intercourse.
- 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.
- carrick bend — type of knot
- carry-on bag — a small bag that is taken inside an aircraft by hand personally by a passenger
- cassel brown — Vandyke brown.
- celebrations — Plural form of celebration.
- celebutantes — Plural form of celebutante.
- celibatarian — inclined towards or characterized by celibacy
- centerboards — Plural form of centerboard.
- central bank — a national bank that does business mainly with a government and with other banks: it regulates the volume and cost of credit
- cerebrations — Plural form of cerebration.
- cerebrotonia — a personality type characterized by restraint, alertness, and an intellectual approach to life: said to be correlated with an ectomorph body type
- chamberlains — Plural form of chamberlain.
- changing bag — a lightproof bag with openings made to fit closely around the arms, used in place of a darkroom in some photographic procedures.
- channel back — an upholstered chair or sofa back having deep vertical grooves.