20-letter words containing b, a, r, l, i
- breakerless ignition — electronic ignition.
- breakfast television — Breakfast television refers to television programmes which are broadcast in the morning at the time when most people are having breakfast.
- bristly sarsaparilla — a coarse plant, Aralia hispida, of the ginseng family, of eastern North America, having a loose cluster of small, greenish flowers and black fruit.
- british thermal unit — a unit of heat in the fps system equal to the quantity of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 pound of water by 1°F. 1 British thermal unit is equivalent to 1055.06 joules or 251.997 calories
- brittle bone disease — bone disorder
- broadcast journalism — journalism as practiced in radio and television.
- brown lung (disease) — a chronic disease of the lungs caused by inhalation of fine textile fibers, esp. cotton; byssinosis
- buck's horn plantain — a Eurasian plant, Plantago coronopus, having leaves resembling a buck's horn: family Plantaginaceae
- california barracuda — a small, slender barracuda, Sphyraena argentea, of coastal seas from Alaska to Baja California, valued as a food fish.
- carbocyclic compound — any of a group of organic chemical compounds in which all the atoms composing the ring are carbon atoms, as benzene or cyclopropane.
- carbohydrate loading — the practice of eating high amounts of carbohydrates, sometimes after a period of low carbohydrate intake, for several days immediately before competing in an athletic event, especially a marathon, in order to store glycogen in the body, thereby providing greater reserves of energy.
- carbon tetrachloride — a colourless volatile nonflammable sparingly soluble liquid made from chlorine and carbon disulphide; tetrachloromethane. It is used as a solvent, cleaning fluid, and insecticide. Formula: CCl4
- central bedfordshire — a unitary authority of S central England. Pop: 252 100 (2007 est). Area: 712 sq km (275 sq miles)
- checkbook journalism — the practice of paying for a news story or an interview, or for exclusive broadcasting or publishing rights.
- child-abuse register — (in Britain) a list of children deemed to be at risk of abuse or injury from their parents or guardians, compiled and held by a local authority, area health authority, or NSPCC Special Unit
- clear air turbulence — turbulent air, not associated with a storm, that affects the flight of aircraft
- clear-air turbulence — atmospheric turbulence, sometimes severe, occurring in air devoid of clouds or other visible indicators that turbulence might be present. Abbreviation: CAT.
- computability theory — (mathematics) The area of theoretical computer science concerning what problems can be solved by any computer. A function is computable if an algorithm can be implemented which will give the correct output for any valid input. Since computer programs are countable but real numbers are not, it follows that there must exist real numbers that cannot be calculated by any program. Unfortunately, by definition, there isn't an easy way of describing any of them! In fact, there are many tasks (not just calculating real numbers) that computers cannot perform. The most well-known is the halting problem, the busy beaver problem is less famous but just as fascinating.
- disability insurance — insurance providing income to a policyholder who is disabled and cannot work.
- distribution channel — trade: retailer
- distributive lattice — (theory) A lattice for which the least upper bound (lub) and greatest lower bound (glb) operators distribute over one another so that a lub (b glb c) == (a lub c) glb (a lub b) and vice versa. ("lub" and "glb" are written in LateX as \sqcup and \sqcap).
- district of columbia — a federal area in the E United States, on the Potomac, coextensive with the federal capital, Washington. 69 sq. mi. (179 sq. km). Abbreviation: DC (for use with zip code), D.C.
- double fertilization — the fertilization process characteristic of flowering plants, in which one sperm cell of a pollen grain fertilizes an egg cell while a second fuses with two polar nuclei to produce a triploid body that gives rise to the endosperm.
- double-trailer truck — tandem trailer (def 1).
- duck-billed dinosaur — hadrosaur.
- dynamic link library — Dynamically Linked Library
- electoral boundaries — the way that a country or area is divided for the purposes of voting in an election
- elizabeth of hungary — Saint. 1207–31, Hungarian princess who devoted herself to charity and asceticism. Feast day: Nov 17 and 19
- employer's liability — an employer's legal responsibility to pay damages to an employee who has been injured or who has contracted an illness because of the work he or she does
- endorsement in blank — an endorsement on a bill of exchange, cheque, etc, naming no payee and thus making the endorsed sum payable to the bearer
- environment variable — (programming, operating system) A variable that is bound in the current environment. When evaluating an expression in some environment, the evaluation of a variable consists of looking up its name in the environment and substituting its value. Most programming languages have some concept of an environment but in Unix shell scripts it has a specific meaning slightly different from other contexts. In shell scripts, environment variables are one kind of shell variable. They differ from local variables and command line arguments in that they are inheritted by a child process. Examples are the PATH variable that tells the shell the file system paths to search to find command executables and the TZ variable which contains the local time zone. The variable called "SHELL" specifies the type of shell being used. These variables are used by commands or shell scripts to discover things about the environment they are operating in. Environment variables can be changed or created by the user or a program. To see a list of environment variables type "setenv" at the csh or tcsh prompt or "set" at the sh, bash, jsh or ksh prompt. In other programming languages, e.g. functional programming languages, the environment is extended with new bindings when a function's parameters are bound to its actual arguments or when new variables are declared. In a block-structured procedural language, the environment usually consists of a linked list of activation records.
- equilibrium constant — The equilibrium constant is the ratio between the amount of reactants and the amount of product for a particular chemical reaction, used to calculate chemical behavior.
- for sb's delectation — If you do something for someone's delectation, you do it to give them enjoyment or pleasure.
- general public virus — (software, legal) A pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or application programs incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same terms as GNU code. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft "infects" software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code.
- gorno-altai republic — a constituent republic of S Russia: mountainous, rising over 4350 m (14 500 ft) in the Altai Mountains of the south. Capital: Gorno-Altaisk. Pop: 202 900 (2002). Area: 92 600 sq km (35 740 sq miles)
- grievous bodily harm — law: serious injury
- hildegard von bingen — Hildegard von (Hildegard of Bingen"Sibyl of the Rhine") 1098–1178, German nun, healer, writer, and composer.
- hindu-arabic numeral — Arabic numeral.
- hyperbolic cotangent — a hyperbolic function that is the ratio of cosh to sinh, being the reciprocal of tanh; coth
- independent variable — Mathematics. a variable in a functional relation whose value determines the value or values of other variables, as x in the relation y = 3 x 2 . Compare dependent variable (def 1).
- information builders — Distributors of LEVEL5 OBJECT. Telephone +1 800 969 INFO.
- intervening variable — a hypothetical variable postulated to account for the way in which a set of independent variables control a set of dependent variables
- laboratory assistant — laboratory technician, lab assistant
- laboratory diagnosis — scientific analysis of a disease
- laboratory equipment — apparatus for scientific research and experiments
- labour-saving device — a machine, gadget, etc, that reduces (human) effort, hard work or labour
- like a ton of bricks — (used esp of the manner of punishing or reprimanding someone) with great force; severely
- live and breathe sth — be passionately interested in sth
- marginal probability — (in a multivariate distribution) the probability of one variable taking a specific value irrespective of the values of the others
- member of parliament — A Member of Parliament is a person who has been elected by the people in a particular area to represent them in a country's parliament. The abbreviation MP is often used.