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18-letter words containing b, e, n, i

  • 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
  • elizabeth petrovna — 1709-62; empress of Russia (1741-62): daughter of Peter I
  • elizabethan sonnet — Shakespearean sonnet
  • embryonic membrane — any of several living membranes enclosing or closely associated with the developing vertebrate embryo, as the allantois, amnion, yolk sac, etc.
  • epstein-barr virus — a virus belonging to the herpes family that causes infectious mononucleosis; it is also implicated in the development of Burkitt's lymphoma and Hodgkin's disease
  • escape sb's notice — If something escapes your notice, you fail to recognize it or realize it.
  • establishmentarian — Adhering to, advocating, or relating to the principle of an established church.
  • 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
  • exhibition killing — the murder of a hostage by terrorists, filmed for broadcasting on television or the internet
  • 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.
  • fire and brimstone — When people talk about fire and brimstone, they are referring to hell and how they think people are punished there after death.
  • fire in your belly — If you say that someone has fire in their belly, you are expressing approval of them because they are energetic, enthusiastic, and have very strong feelings.
  • fire-and-brimstone — threatening punishment in the hereafter: a fire-and-brimstone sermon.
  • flash butt welding — a method of welding metal edge-to-edge with a powerful electric flash followed by the application of pressure.
  • for the time being — the system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future; indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another.
  • fragmentation bomb — a bomb designed to break into many small, high-velocity fragments when detonated.
  • gabriele dannunzio — Gabriele [Italian gah-bree-e-le] /Italian ˌgɑ briˈɛ lɛ/ (Show IPA), (Duca Minimo) 1863–1938, Italian soldier, novelist, and poet.
  • 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.
  • get off one's bike — to lose one's self-control
  • gilbert and george — a team of artists, Gilbert Proesch, Italian, born 1942, and George Passmore, British, born 1943: noted esp for their photomontages and performance works
  • gnu public licence — (legal)   Properly known as the General Public License. Improperly known as the General Public Virus.
  • golden gate bridge — a bridge connecting N California with San Francisco peninsula. 4200-foot (1280-meter) center span.
  • grumbling appendix — a condition in which the appendix causes intermittent pain but appendicitis has not developed
  • hamilton's problem — Hamiltonian problem
  • handkerchief table — corner table.
  • hardy-weinberg law — a principle stating that in an infinitely large, randomly mating population in which selection, migration, and mutation do not occur, the frequencies of alleles and genotypes do not change from generation to generation.
  • have a thing about — If you have a thing about someone or something, you have very strong feelings about them.
  • 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
  • herring bone weave — a pattern consisting of adjoining vertical rows of slanting lines, any two contiguous lines forming either a V or an inverted V , used in masonry, textiles, embroidery, etc.
  • 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.
  • hexachlorobiphenyl — (organic compound) Either of forty-two isomers of the polychlorinated biphenyl containing six chlorine atoms.
  • highbush cranberry — a shrub, Viburnum trilobum, of northern North America, having broad clusters of white flowers and edible scarlet berries.
  • honorable ordinary — any of the ordinaries believed to be among those that are oldest or that were the source of the other ordinaries, as the chief, pale, fess, bend, chevron, cross, and saltire.
  • honourable mention — If something that you do in a competition is given an honourable mention, it receives special praise from the judges although it does not actually win a prize.
  • how the wind blows — air in natural motion, as that moving horizontally at any velocity along the earth's surface: A gentle wind blew through the valley. High winds were forecast.
  • hyperbilirubinemia — an abnormally high level of bilirubin in the blood, manifested by jaundice, anorexia, and malaise, occurring in association with liver disease and certain hemolytic anemias.
  • impressionableness — The quality of being impressionable.
  • in black and white — without colour
  • in good/bad repair — If something such as a building is in good repair, it is in good condition. If it is in bad repair, it is in bad condition.
  • in the belief that — If you do one thing in the belief that another thing is true or will happen, you do it because you think, usually wrongly, that it is true or will happen.
  • in the same breath — the air inhaled and exhaled in respiration.
  • incapacity benefit — (in Britain) a regular government payment made to people who are unable to work for an extended period through disability
  • incommensurability — not commensurable; having no common basis, measure, or standard of comparison.
  • inconsiderableness — Quality of being inconsiderable.
  • 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.
  • indecent behaviour — the offence of committing indecent acts
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