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18-letter words containing b, e, l, c, t, i

  • 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
  • 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.
  • forward compatible — forward compatibility
  • 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.
  • handkerchief table — corner table.
  • in black and white — without colour
  • incommensurability — not commensurable; having no common basis, measure, or standard of comparison.
  • incremental backup — (operating system)   A kind of backup that copies all files which have changed since the date of the previous backup. The first backup of a file system should include all files - a "full backup". Call this level 0. The next backup could also be a full level 0 backup but it is usually much quicker to do a level 1 backup which will include only those files which have changed since the level 0 backup. Together the level 0 and level 1 backups will include the latest version of every file. Level 1 backups can be made until, say, the backup tape is nearly full, after which we can switch to level 2. Each level includes those files which have changed since the last backup at a lower level. The more levels you use, the longer it will take to restore the latest version of a file (or all files) if you don't know when it was last modified. Compare differential backup.
  • indestructibleness — The quality of being indestructible.
  • indolebutyric acid — a white or yellowish, crystalline, water-insoluble powder, C 12 H 13 O 2 N, a plant hormone similar to indoleacetic acid and used for the same purposes.
  • intensional object — the object of a propositional attitude that may or may not exist, as in Robert is dreaming of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This must be an intensional (or opaque) context, for otherwise, since there is no pot of gold, Robert would be dreaming of nothing
  • interchangeability — (of two things) capable of being put or used in the place of each other: interchangeable symbols.
  • jacobite rebellion — the unsuccessful Jacobite rising of 1715 led by James Francis Edward Stuart
  • knotted cranesbill — a British wildflower, Geranium nodosum, an meadow geranium with bright pink or purple flowers
  • labeled bracketing — a representation of the constituent structure of a string, as a word or sentence, comparable to a tree diagram, in which each constituent is shown in brackets and given a subscript grammatical label, with each bracketed item corresponding to a node in a tree diagram.
  • legislative branch — the branch of government having the power to make laws; the legislature.
  • linear combination — a sum of products of each quantity times a constant: The expression aX + bY + cZ is a linear combination of X, Y, and Z, where a, b, and c are constants.
  • loschmidt's number — the number of molecules in one cubic centimeter of an ideal gas at standard temperature and pressure, equal to 2.687 × 10 19.
  • metabolic syndrome — Pathology. a group of medical conditions present simultaneously in a patient, as high blood pressure, low HDL cholesterol levels, and an excess of abdominal fat, that increases a person's risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Also called insulin resistance syndrome.
  • mobile police unit — a motorized police unit
  • mobility allowance — an allowance paid by the government to help people who have limited mobility
  • multicast backbone — (MBONE) A virtual network on top of the Internet which supports routing of IP multicast packets, intended for multimedia transmission. MBONE gives public access desktop video communications. The quality is poor with only 3-5 frames per second instead of the 30 frames per second of commercial television. Its advantage is that it avoids all telecommunications costs normally associated with teleconferencing. An interesting innovation is the use of MBONE for audio communications and an electronic "whiteboard" where the computer screen becomes a shared workspace where two physically remote parties can draw on and edit shared documents in real-time.
  • nobiliary particle — a preposition forming part of a title of nobility or surname, as French de or German von.
  • noninterchangeable — That cannot be interchanged with another.
  • nuclear capability — If a country has nuclear capability, it is able to produce nuclear power and usually nuclear weapons.
  • objective idealism — a form of idealism asserting that the act of experiencing has a reality combining and transcending the natures of the object experienced and of the mind of the observer.
  • objective modula-2 — (language)   (Or "ObjM2") An extension to Modula-2 for Cocoa and GNUstep software development. Objective Modula-2 follows the Objective-C object model and retains the bracketed Smalltalk message passing syntax used in Objective-C. Classes written in ObjM2 can be used within ObjC and vice versa. ObjM2 also retains Modula-2's data encapsulation features, namely nested modules with explicit import and export lists. Due to the strict type checking in Modula-2, ObjM2 can be considered a much safer programming language than is ObjC, yet losing none of the capabilities of ObjC.
  • oblique projection — something that is oblique.
  • octachlorobiphenyl — (organic compound) Either of twelve isomers of the polychlorinated biphenyl containing eight chlorine atoms.
  • october revolution — Russian Revolution (def 2).
  • optical brightener — an additive that dyes and brightens fabric or paper
  • population balance — A population balance is a model showing particle sizes during a grinding process, which is used when designing a process.
  • precipitable water — the total water vapor contained in a unit vertical column of the atmosphere.
  • pseudotuberculosis — an acute, sometimes fatal disease of rodents, birds, and other animals, including humans, caused by the bacterium Yersinia (Pasteurella) pseudotuberculosis, and characterized by the formation of nodules resembling those that result from tuberculosis.
  • public examination — an examination, such as a GCSE exam, that is set by a central examining board
  • public expenditure — spending by central government, local authorities, and public corporations
  • rabbit-foot clover — a plant, Trifolium arvense, having trifoliate leaves with narrow leaflets and fuzzy, cylindrical, grayish-pink flower heads.
  • rubbish collection — the collection of domestic refuse for disposal
  • scottish blackface — a common breed of hardy mountain sheep having horns and a black face, kept chiefly on the mainland of Scotland
  • selective abortion — the aborting of particular embryos for medical or social reasons
  • selective breeding — the raising of animals with particular genetic traits through careful choice of parents
  • stationary bicycle — an exercise bike
  • statistical tables — tables showing the values of the cumulative distribution functions, probability functions, or probability density functions of certain common distributions for different values of their parameters, and used esp to determine whether or not a particular statistical result exceeds the required significance level
  • street credibility — street cred.
  • subatomic particle — physics:
  • subordinate clause — a clause that modifies the principal clause or some part of it or that serves a noun function in the principal clause, as when she arrived in the sentence I was there when she arrived or that she has arrived in the sentence I doubt that she has arrived.
  • tectorial membrane — membrane in the inner ear that covers the organ of Corti
  • teleobjective lens — telephoto lens.
  • television cabinet — a cabinet on which a television set is placed or in which it is encased
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