13-letter words containing b, a, n
- bacterization — subjection to bacterial action
- badminton cup — a long refreshing drink of claret with soda water and sugar
- bafana bafana — the official name for the South African national soccer team
- baffin island — the largest island of the Canadian Arctic, between Greenland and Hudson Bay. Area: 476 560 sq km (184 000 sq miles)
- bag-snatching — theft that involves snatching women's handbags
- baggage train — a train of wagons carrying the equipment needed by an army on the march
- bail bondsman — an individual or firm that lends bail money to defendants awaiting trial
- baker's dozen — thirteen
- baking powder — Baking powder is an ingredient used in cake making. It causes cakes to rise when they are in the oven.
- balance shaft — a shaft in a vehicle engine that is designed to reduce the amount of vibration from other moving parts as it rotates
- balance sheet — A balance sheet is a written statement of the amount of money and property that a company or person has, including amounts of money that are owed or are owing. Balance sheet is also used to refer to the general financial state of a company.
- balance staff — a pivoted axle or shaft on which the balance is mounted.
- balance wheel — a wheel oscillating against the hairspring of a timepiece, thereby regulating its beat
- balanced diet — a diet consisting of the proper quantities and proportions of foods needed to maintain health or growth.
- balanced fund — a mutual fund made up of both stocks and bonds
- balanced line — a transmission line in which the oppositely directed components are symmetrical with respect to each other and to the ground.
- balanced step — any of a series of staircase winders so planned that they are nearly as wide at the inside of the stair as the adjacent fliers.
- balanced tree — (algorithm) An optimisation of a tree which aims to keep equal numbers of items on each subtree of each node so as to minimise the maximum path from the root to any leaf node. As items are inserted and deleted, the tree is restructured to keep the nodes balanced and the search paths uniform. Such an algorithm is appropriate where the overheads of the reorganisation on update are outweighed by the benefits of faster search. A B-tree is a kind of balanced tree that can have more than two subtrees at each node (i.e. one that is not restricted to being a binary tree).
- balancing act — If you perform a balancing act, you try to deal successfully with two or more people, groups, or situations that are in opposition to each other.
- balch springs — a town in NE Texas.
- balkan states — the countries of the Balkan Peninsula: the former Yugoslavian Republics, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, and the European part of Turkey
- balkanization — If you disapprove of the division of a country into separate independent states, you can refer to the Balkanization of the country.
- ball and ring — a simplified bead-and-reel turning, used especially in English and American furniture of the 17th century.
- ball handling — the control of the ball, as in basketball or soccer, by skillful dribbling and accurate passing.
- ballad stanza — a four-line stanza, often used in ballads, in which the second and fourth lines rhyme and have three stresses each and the first and third lines are unrhymed and have four stresses each
- ballet dancer — a man or woman who takes part in ballet dancing, usually professionally
- ballet lesson — a class in which ballet is taught
- balloon chuck — a lathe chuck having the form of a hollow hemisphere, for enclosing and holding small parts, as balance staffs of watches, so that only their ends are exposed.
- balloon clock — a bracket clock of the late 18th century, having a round dial on a short case with concave sides resting on bracket feet.
- balloon frame — a wooden building frame composed of machine-sawed scantlings fastened with nails, having studs rising the full height of the frame with the joists nailed to the studs and supported by sills or by ribbons let into the studs.
- balloon shade — a window shade that when raised is gathered into a series of puffy festoons created by inverted pleats in the fabric.
- balloon-berry — strawberry-raspberry.
- balneotherapy — the treatment of disease by bathing, esp to improve limb mobility in arthritic and neuromuscular disorders
- bamboozlement — The act or process of bamboozling or being bamboozled.
- banana bender — a native or inhabitant of Queensland
- banana family — the plant family Musaceae, characterized by large treelike herbaceous plants of tropical regions, having a trunk formed by spiraling leaf sheaths, and bearing large leaves, flower clusters above leathery red-to-purple bracts, and fleshy fruit in clusters, including the banana and plantain.
- banana spider — a large, yellowish, tropical crab spider (Heteropoda venatoria) occasionally found in bunches of bananas shipped to the Temperate Zones
- banbury tarts — small baked pastries filled with raisins, currants, etc.
- bancassurance — the selling of insurance products by a bank to its customers
- band spectrum — a spectrum consisting of a number of bands of closely spaced lines that are associated with emission or absorption of radiation by molecules
- band together — If people band together, they meet and act as a group in order to try and achieve something.
- band-aid baby — a child conceived to strengthen a faltering relationship
- banded purple — any color having components of both red and blue, such as lavender, especially one deep in tone.
- banderilleros — Plural form of banderillero.
- bandicoot rat — any of three burrowing rats of the genera Bandicota and Nesokia, of S and SE Asia: family Muridae
- bandspreading — an additional tuning control in some radio receivers whereby a selected narrow band of frequencies can be spread over a wider frequency band, in order to give finer control of tuning
- bang goes sth — If you say bang goes something, you mean that it is now obvious that it cannot succeed or be achieved.
- bang on about — If someone bangs on about something, they keep talking about it in a boring or annoying way.
- banister back — a back of a chair or the like, usually having semicircular spindles between the top rail and the cross rail or seat.
- bank discount — interest on a loan deducted from the principal amount when the loan is made and based on the loan's face value