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18-letter words containing b, c, e

  • controllable-pitch — (of a marine or aircraft propeller) having blades whose pitch can be changed during navigation or flight; variable-pitch.
  • cool as a cucumber — very calm; self-possessed
  • correspondent bank — A correspondent bank is a bank that provides services such as accepting deposits for another bank.
  • credibility rating — a supposed measure of how far a person can be believed or trusted
  • creme de framboise — a liqueur flavored with raspberries.
  • cumberland plateau — division of the W Appalachians, extending from S W.Va. to N Ala.
  • cyrano de bergerac — Savinien (savinjɛ̃). 1619–55, French writer and soldier, famous as a duellist and for his large nose. He became widely known through the verse drama Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) by Edmond Rostand
  • de-objectification — to present as an object, especially of sight, touch, or other physical sense; make objective; externalize.
  • death by chocolate — a very rich type of chocolate dessert or cake
  • debt consolidation — the process of taking out a new loan (often secured on one's property) in order to pay off a number of existing debts
  • debt restructuring — Debt restructuring is a method of organizing a company's debts in a different way in order to make the company more likely to be able to pay them.
  • decachlorobiphenyl — (organic compound) The fully chlorinated polychlorinated biphenyl containing ten chlorine atoms.
  • deductive database — (database)   A combination of a conventional database containing facts, a knowledge base containing rules, and an inference engine which allows the derivation of information implied by the facts and rules. Commonly, the knowledge base is expressed in a subset of first-order logic and either a SLDNF or Datalog inference engine is used.
  • deep-discount bond — a fixed-interest security that pays little or no interest but is issued at a substantial discount to its redemption value, thus largely substituting capital gain for income
  • diamondback turtle — any edible North American terrapin of the genus Malaclemys, esp M. terrapin, occurring in brackish and tidal waters and having diamond-shaped markings on the shell: family Emydidae
  • distribution curve — the curve or line of a graph in which cumulative frequencies are plotted as ordinates and values of the variate as abscissas.
  • dominican republic — a republic in the West Indies, occupying the E part of the island of Hispaniola. 19,129 sq. mi. (49,545 sq. km). Capital: Santo Domingo.
  • double achievement — a representation of the arms of a husband beside those of his wife such that a difference of rank between them is shown.
  • drop in the bucket — a deep, cylindrical vessel, usually of metal, plastic, or wood, with a flat bottom and a semicircular bail, for collecting, carrying, or holding water, sand, fruit, etc.; pail.
  • eclipsing variable — a variable star whose changes in brightness are caused by periodic eclipses of two stars in a binary system.
  • electronic banking — the transfer of money between financial institutions through an exchange of electronic signals over a network
  • electronic mailbox — a device used to store electronic mail
  • electrovalent bond — a type of chemical bond in which one atom loses an electron to form a positive ion and the other atom gains the electron to form a negative ion. The resulting ions are held together by electrostatic attraction
  • embryonic membrane — any of several living membranes enclosing or closely associated with the developing vertebrate embryo, as the allantois, amnion, yolk sac, etc.
  • escape sb's notice — If something escapes your notice, you fail to recognize it or realize it.
  • established church — a Church that is officially recognized as a national institution, esp the Church of England
  • exclusive brethren — one of the two main divisions of the Plymouth Brethren, which, in contrast to the Open Brethren, restricts its members' contacts with those outside the sect
  • executable content — (operating system)   Executable programs sent by one computer to another via a network. For example a Java applet is executable content. Usage: rare.
  • fabric conditioner — a product used when washing clothes to make them feel softer
  • fibonacci sequence — (mathematics)   The infinite sequence of numbers beginning 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... in which each term is the sum of the two terms preceding it. The ratio of successive Fibonacci terms tends to the golden ratio, namely (1 + sqrt 5)/2.
  • file control block — (operating system)   (FCB) An MS-DOS data structure that stores information about an open file. The number of FCBs is configured in CONFIG.SYS with a command FCBS=x,y where x (between 1 and 255 inclusive, default 4) specifies the number of file control blocks to allocate and therefore the number of files that MS-DOS can have open at one time. y (not needed from DOS 5.0 onward) specifies the number of files to be closed automatically if all x are in use.
  • flat on one's back — lying supine
  • forward compatible — forward compatibility
  • four-color problem — the problem, solved in 1976, of proving the theorem that any geographic map can be colored using only four colors so that no connected countries with a common boundary are colored the same color.
  • garbage collection — (programming)   (GC) The process by which dynamically allocated storage is reclaimed during the execution of a program. The term usually refers to automatic periodic storage reclamation by the garbage collector (part of the run-time system), as opposed to explicit code to free specific blocks of memory. Automatic garbage collection is usually triggered during memory allocation when the amount free memory falls below some threshold or after a certain number of allocations. Normal execution is suspended and the garbage collector is run. There are many variations on this basic scheme. Languages like Lisp represent expressions as graphs built from cells which contain pointers and data. These languages use automatic dynamic storage allocation to build expressions. During the evaluation of an expression it is necessary to reclaim space which is used by subexpressions but which is no longer pointed to by anything. This reclaimed memory is returned to the free memory pool for subsequent reallocation. Without garbage collection the program's memory requirements would increase monotonically throughout execution, possibly exceeding system limits on virtual memory size. The three main methods are mark-sweep garbage collection, reference counting and copying garbage collection. See also the AI koan about garbage collection.
  • gas-discharge tube — any tube in which an electric discharge takes place through a gas
  • get one's own back — of, relating to, or belonging to oneself or itself (usually used after a possessive to emphasize the idea of ownership, interest, or relation conveyed by the possessive): He spent only his own money.
  • give sb the creeps — If someone or something gives you the creeps, they make you feel very nervous or frightened.
  • gnu public licence — (legal)   Properly known as the General Public License. Improperly known as the General Public Virus.
  • go back to the mat — to abandon urban civilization
  • golden bantam corn — a horticultural variety of sweet corn having yellow kernels.
  • gooseneck barnacle — goose barnacle
  • gopher object type — A character specifying how to display a Gopher document. Current types are: 0 document 1 menu 2 CSO phone book entity 3 error 4 binhex binary 5 DOS binary (deprecated) 6 UU binary (deprecated) 7 index search 8 telnet connection 9 binary + duplicate server for previous object I image M MIME document T tn3270 based telnet connection c cal g GIF image h HTML s binary u {Usenet} newsgroup (1999-10-14)
  • green-backed heron — a small, American heron, Butorides striatus, having glossy green wings.
  • handkerchief table — corner table.
  • handlebar mustache — A handlebar mustache is a long thick mustache with curled ends.
  • have on one's back — to be burdened with
  • heat of combustion — the heat evolved when one mole of a substance is burnt in oxygen at constant volume
  • hebdomadal council — the governing council or senate of Oxford University
  • herringbone stitch — a type of cross-stitch in embroidery similar to the catch stitch in sewing, consisting of an overlapped V -shaped stitch that when worked in a continuous pattern produces a twill-weave effect.
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