16-letter words containing b, c, e
- drugstore cowboy — a young man who loafs around drugstores or on street corners.
- drumhead cabbage — acommon type of cabbage with tightly packed leaves and a rounded form with a slightly flattened top
- dry-cell battery — a dry battery
- duplicate bridge — a form of contract bridge used in tournaments in which contestants play the identical series of deals, with each deal being scored independently, permitting individual scores to be compared.
- ebenezer scrooge — Ebenezer [eb-uh-nee-zer] /ˌɛb əˈni zər/ (Show IPA) a miserly curmudgeon in Dickens' Christmas Carol.
- eclipsing binary — a variable star whose changes in brightness are caused by periodic eclipses of two stars in a binary system.
- economic embargo — a legal stoppage of commerce, usually taken by one nation or group of nations to harm the economy of another nation or group, often to force a political change
- el camino bignum — (humour) /el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ The road mundanely called El Camino Real, a road through the San Francisco peninsula that originally extended all the way down to Mexico City and many portions of which are still intact. Navigation on the San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which defines logical north and south even though it isn't really north-south many places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University. The Spanish word "real" (which has two syllables: /ray-al'/) means "royal"; El Camino Real is "the royal road". In the Fortran language, a "real" quantity is a number typically precise to seven significant digits, and a "double precision" quantity is a larger floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (other languages have similar "real" types). When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on "real", he started calling it "El Camino Double Precision" - but when the hacker was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it "El Camino Bignum", and that name has stuck. (See bignum).
- electric blanket — electrically-heated bedcover
- embarkation card — an official document that allows travellers to leave a country by boarding a ship or plane
- endocannabinoids — Plural form of endocannabinoid.
- executive member — a member of an executive committee
- exhibition match — a sports match which is not part of a competition but instead serves the function of demonstrating the skills of the players
- experience table — an actuarial table, esp a mortality table based on past statistics
- false beechdrops — either of two parasitic or saprophytic plants of the genus Monotropa, especially the tawny or reddish M. hypopithys (false beechdrops) of eastern North America.
- fancy dress ball — a ball at which the guests wear fancy dress
- feedback control — (electronics) A control system which monitors its effect on the system it is controlling and modifies its output accordingly. For example, a thermostat has two inputs: the desired temperature and the current temperature (the latter is the feedback). The output of the thermostat changes so as to try to equalise the two inputs. Computer disk drives use feedback control to position the read/write heads accurately on a recording track. Complex systems such as the human body contain many feedback systems that interact with each other; the homeostasis mechanisms that control body temperature and acidity are good examples.
- femme de chambre — a chambermaid
- fibonacci number — a number in the Fibonacci sequence, each of which is the sum of the previous two
- fibonacci series — a sequence of integers in which each integer (Fibonacci number) after the second is the sum of the two preceding integers; specif., the series 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, . . .
- flat-bed scanner — a type of optical scanner having a flat, stationary surface on which a page is scanned by a moving head.
- flying ambulance — an aircraft used to take sick or injured people to hospital
- football special — a train service provided specially to transport football supporters to and from a match
- for all sb cares — You can use for all I care to emphasize that it does not matter at all to you what someone does.
- forbush decrease — the sudden decrease in the intensity of cosmic rays after an increase in solar activity.
- forced vibration — Forced vibration is a type of vibration in which a force is repeatedly applied to a mechanical system.
- gabriel, richard — Richard Gabriel
- galvanic battery — battery (def 1a).
- gapless playback — audio or visual playback without any interruptions or silence between tracks or scenes
- gentlemen's club — a private social club whose members were traditionally aristocratic males
- gibberellic acid — a gibberellin C 18 H 21 O 4 COOH, produced as a metabolite by the fungus Gibberella fujikuroi, used as a stimulator of plant growth.
- globular cluster — a comparatively older, spherically symmetrical, compact group of up to a million old stars, held together by mutual gravitation, that are located in the galactic halo and move in giant and highly eccentric orbits around the galactic center.
- ground substance — Also called matrix. the homogeneous substance in which the fibers and cells of connective tissue are embedded.
- growth substance — any substance, produced naturally by a plant or manufactured commercially, that, in very low concentrations, affects plant growth; a plant hormone
- hayes-compatible — (communications) A description of a modem which understands the same set of commands as one made by Hayes.
- hendecasyllables — Plural form of hendecasyllable.
- horseback riding — activity: riding a horse
- hot-cathode tube — thermionic tube.
- hubble telescope — a telescope launched into orbit around the earth in 1990 to provide information about the universe in the visible, infrared, and ultraviolet ranges
- huckleberry finn — (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) a novel (1884) by Mark Twain.
- humboldt current — a cold Pacific Ocean current flowing N along the coasts of Chile and Peru.
- huntington beach — a city in SW California, SE of Los Angeles.
- hypersusceptible — hypersensitive (def 2).
- icterine warbler — a European variety of tree warbler (Hippolais icterina )
- imperceptibility — very slight, gradual, or subtle: the imperceptible slope of the road.
- imperfectability — The quality of not being perfectable; of being forever imperfect.
- imperfectibility — The state or quality of being imperfectible.
- inaccessibleness — The quality or state of being inaccessible or unreachable.
- inapplicableness — The state or quality of being inapplicable; inapplicability.
- incommensurables — Plural form of incommensurable.