12-letter words containing b, e, n, l
- bouleuterion — a council chamber in ancient Greece.
- bounce flash — a flash lamp designed to produce a bounced flash.
- bounce light — Also, bounce lighting. light that is bounced off a reflective surface onto the subject in order to achieve a softer lighting effect.
- bourne shell — (sh, Shellish). The original command-line interpreter shell and script language for Unix written by S.R. Bourne of Bell Laboratories in 1978. sh has been superseded for interactive use by the Berkeley C shell, csh but still widely used for writing shell scripts. There were even earlier shells, see glob. [Details?]
- bournonville — Auguste [French oh-gyst] /French oʊˈgüst/ (Show IPA), 1805–79, Danish ballet dancer and choreographer.
- bowdlerizing — to expurgate (a written work) by removing or modifying passages considered vulgar or objectionable.
- bowel cancer — cancer of the colon
- boxing glove — Boxing gloves are big padded gloves worn for boxing.
- brake lining — a curved thin strip of an asbestos composition riveted to a brake shoe to provide it with a renewable surface
- brand leader — The brand leader of a particular product is the brand of it that most people choose to buy.
- brazilianite — a mineral, sodium aluminum phosphate, Na 2 Al 6 P 4 O 16 (OH) 8 , occurring in yellow-green crystals with a vitreous luster: used as a gem.
- bridle joint — a heading joint in which the end of one member, notched to form two parallel tenons, is fitted into two gains cut into the edges of a second member.
- brilliantine — a perfumed oil used to make the hair smooth and shiny
- brinell test — a test for determining the relative hardness (Brinell hardness) of a metal by measuring the diameter of the indentation made when a hardened steel ball is forced into the metal under a given pressure: the measure of hardness (Brinell number) is equal to the load in kilograms divided by the surface area in square millimeters of the indentation
- broken-field — of or having to do with running in which the ball carrier zigzags so as to go past defenders and avoid being tackled by them
- bronze medal — A bronze medal is a medal made of bronze or bronze-coloured metal that is given as a prize to the person who comes third in a competition, especially a sports contest.
- brown hackle — an artificial fly having a peacock herl body, golden tag and tail, and brown hackle.
- brunelleschi — Filippo (fiˈlippo). 1377–1446, Italian architect, whose works in Florence include the dome of the cathedral, the Pazzi chapel of Santa Croce, and the church of San Lorenzo
- bubble dance — a solo dance by a nude or nearly nude woman, as in a burlesque show, using one or more balloons for covering.
- bubble point — the temperature at which bubbles just start to appear in a heated liquid mixture
- bubble under — to remain just beneath a particular level
- 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
- bull session — A bull session is an informal conversation among a small group of people.
- bullet point — A bullet point is one of a series of important items for discussion or action in a document, usually marked by a square or round symbol.
- bullet train — a passenger train that travels at very high speed
- bullet wound — a wound made by a bullet
- bundle buggy — a shopping cart, usually one owned by the shopper rather than one provided by the store.
- bunny boiler — a person, esp a woman, who is considered to be emotionally unstable and likely to be dangerously vengeful
- bush singlet — a black woollen singlet often worn by farm labourers
- businesslike — If you describe someone as businesslike, you mean that they deal with things in an efficient way without wasting time.
- by all means — You can say 'by all means' to tell someone that you are very willing to allow them to do something.
- by and large — You use by and large to indicate that a statement is mostly but not completely true.
- bye-election — a special election, not held at the time of a general election, to fill a vacancy in Parliament.
- byelorussian — Byelorussian means belonging or relating to Byelorussia or to its people or culture.
- 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
- 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).
- 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.
- 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 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