12-letter words containing b, e, n, c
- buckle under — If you buckle under to a person or a situation, you do what they want you to do, even though you do not want to do it.
- buckler fern — any of various ferns of the genus Dryopteris, such as D. dilatata (broad buckler fern): family Polypodiaceae
- buffet lunch — a lunch at which people stand up and help themselves from the table
- bumping race — (esp at Oxford and Cambridge) a race in which rowing eights start an equal distance one behind the other and each tries to bump the boat in front
- butter icing — a mixture of butter and icing sugar used for filling or topping cakes
- bye-election — a special election, not held at the time of a general election, to fill a vacancy in Parliament.
- cabinet wine — cabinet (def 10).
- cabinet-wine — a piece of furniture with shelves, drawers, etc., for holding or displaying items: a curio cabinet; a file cabinet.
- cabinetmaker — A cabinetmaker is a person who makes high-quality wooden furniture.
- cable length — a unit of length in nautical use that has various values, including 100 fathoms (600 feet)
- cable-laying — involved in or connected to the activity of laying cables
- cablecasting — relating to broadcasting by cable
- cadet branch — the family or family branch of a younger son
- calabar bean — the dark brown very poisonous seed of a leguminous woody climbing plant, Physostigma venenosum, of tropical Africa, used as a source of the drug physostigmine
- call-by-name — (reduction) (CBN) (Normal order reduction, leftmost, outermost reduction). An argument passing convention (first provided by ALGOL 60?) where argument expressions are passed unevaluated. This is usually implemented by passing a pointer to a thunk - some code which will return the value of the argument and an environment giving the values of its free variables. This evaluation strategy is guaranteed to reach a normal form if one exists. When used to implement functional programming languages, call-by-name is usually combined with graph reduction to avoid repeated evaluation of the same expression. This is then known as call-by-need. The opposite of call-by-name is call-by-value where arguments are evaluated before they are passed to a function. This is more efficient but is less likely to terminate in the presence of infinite data structures and recursive functions. Arguments to macros are usually passed using call-by-name.
- call-by-need — (reduction) A reduction strategy which delays evaluation of function arguments until their values are needed. A value is needed if it is an argument to a primitive function or it is the condition in a conditional. Call-by-need is one aspect of lazy evaluation. The term first appears in Chris Wadsworth's thesis "Semantics and Pragmatics of the Lambda calculus" (Oxford, 1971, p. 183). It was used later, by J. Vuillemin in his thesis (Stanford, 1973).
- cancerphobia — an excessive fear of getting cancer
- cannibalised — Simple past tense and past participle of cannibalise.
- cannibalized — Simple past tense and past participle of cannibalize.
- cannibalizes — Third-person singular simple present indicative form of cannibalize.
- cannonballed — Simple past tense and past participle of cannonball.
- canterburies — Plural form of canterbury.
- carbocholine — carbachol.
- carbon cycle — the circulation of carbon between living organisms and their surroundings. Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is synthesized by plants into plant tissue, which is ingested and metabolized by animals and converted to carbon dioxide again during respiration and decay
- carbon fiber — a very strong, lightweight synthetic fiber used in protective clothing, spacecraft components, racing shells, etc.
- carbon fibre — a black silky thread of pure carbon made by heating and stretching textile fibres and used because of its lightness and strength at high temperatures for reinforcing resins, ceramics, and metals, esp in turbine blades and for fishing rods
- carbon paper — Carbon paper is thin paper with a dark substance on one side. You use it to make copies of letters, bills, and other papers.
- carbon steel — steel whose characteristics are determined by the amount of carbon it contains
- carbon value — an empirical measurement of the tendency of a lubricant to form carbon when in use
- carbonaceous — of, resembling, or containing carbon
- carbonatites — Plural form of carbonatite.
- carnal abuse — Law. any lascivious contact with the sexual organs of a child by an adult, especially without sexual intercourse.
- carrick bend — type of knot
- cassel brown — Vandyke brown.
- celebrations — Plural form of celebration.
- celebutantes — Plural form of celebutante.
- celibatarian — inclined towards or characterized by celibacy
- centerboards — Plural form of centerboard.
- central bank — a national bank that does business mainly with a government and with other banks: it regulates the volume and cost of credit
- cerebrations — Plural form of cerebration.
- cerebrotonia — a personality type characterized by restraint, alertness, and an intellectual approach to life: said to be correlated with an ectomorph body type
- cerebrotonic — relating to or resembling a personality type characterized by shyness, introspection, and emotional restraint, and often associated with an ectomorphic physique
- chamberlains — Plural form of chamberlain.
- channel back — an upholstered chair or sofa back having deep vertical grooves.
- channel bass — red drum.
- chenin blanc — a white grape grown in the Loire region of France and in South Africa, California, New Zealand, and elsewhere, used for making wine
- childbearing — Childbearing is the process of giving birth to babies.
- chimneyboard — a partition or a cover to shut off a fireplace
- chinaberries — Plural form of chinaberry.
- chinese burn — a minor torture inflicted by twisting the skin of a person's wrist or arm in two different directions simultaneously