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19-letter words containing b, e, r, i

  • behavioral medicine — an interdisciplinary field that uses the concepts and techniques of the behavioral sciences to improve physical and emotional health.
  • behavioural science — the application of scientific methods to the study of the behaviour of organisms
  • behind closed doors — If people have talks and discussions behind closed doors, they have them in private because they want them to be kept secret.
  • belgian east africa — a former Belgian trust territory in Africa, also (1924–62) Ruanda-Urundi, now the independent countries of Rwanda and Burundi.
  • benefit performance — a theatrical or musical performance in aid of charity
  • bernoulli principle — (Or "air foil principle", after Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli, 1700-1782) The law that pressure in a fluid decreases with the rate of flow. It has been applied to a class of hard disk drives. See Bernoulli Box.
  • bernoulli's theorem — Statistics. law of averages (def 1).
  • bernstein condition — (parallel)   Processes cannot execute in parallel if one effects values used by the other. Nor can they execute in parallel if any subsequent process uses data effected by both, i.e. whose value might depend on the order of execution.
  • betamethyl acrolein — crotonaldehyde.
  • bi-lateral symmetry — a basic body plan in which the left and right sides of the organism can be divided into approximate mirror images of each other along the midline.
  • bicarbonate of soda — Bicarbonate of soda is a white powder which is used in baking to make cakes rise, and also as a medicine for your stomach.
  • binary large object — (database)   (BLOB) A large block of data stored in a database, such as an image or sound file. A BLOB has no structure which can be interpreted by the database management system but is known only by its size and location.
  • binomial experiment — an experiment consisting of a fixed number of independent trials each with two possible outcomes, success and failure, and the same probability of success. The probability of a given number of successes is described by a binominal distribution
  • bird's-eye primrose — a Eurasian primrose, Primula farinosa, having clusters of purplish flowers with yellow centres
  • bird's-foot trefoil — any of various creeping leguminous Eurasian plants of the genus Lotus, esp L. corniculatus, with red-tipped yellow flowers and seed pods resembling the claws of a bird
  • bismuth oxychloride — a white, crystalline, water-insoluble powder, BiOCl, used chiefly in the manufacture of pigments, face powders, and artificial pearls.
  • bit-paired keyboard — (hardware)   (Obsolete, or "bit-shift keyboard") A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed. In order to avoid making the thing more of a Rube Goldberg kluge than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the same basic bit pattern on one key. Looking at the ASCII chart, we find: high low bits bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 010 ! " # $ % & ' ( ) 011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). This was *not* the weirdest variant of the QWERTY layout widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029 card punches. When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, there was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product look like an office typewriter. These alternatives became known as "bit-paired" and "typewriter-paired" keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical - and because most hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was little pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter standard. The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The "typewriter-paired" standard became universal, "bit-paired" hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse.
  • black warrior river — a river in N central Alabama, flowing SW past Birmingham to the Tombigbee River. 178 miles (286 km) long.
  • blackbelly rosefish — a reddish scorpionfish, Helicolenus dactylopterus, inhabiting the deep waters of the western Atlantic Ocean.
  • blood-brain barrier — the barrier created by the walls of the capillaries of the brain that prevents certain substances, as most proteins and drugs, from passing from the blood into the brain tissue and cerebrospinal fluid
  • blowing your buffer — (jargon)   Losing your train of thought. A reference to buffer overflow.
  • blue screen of life — (operating system)   (BSOL, by analogy with "Blue Screen of Death") The opening screen of Microsoft Windows NT. This screen shows the file system loading, and any problems such as conversions from FAT to NTFS or a scan of a hard drive. The Blue Screen of Life occurs in one way, as opposed to the Blue Screen of Death, which can occur in many different ways and times.
  • blue-breasted quail — a small, brightly colored quail, Coturnix chinensis, of southern Asia and Australia, widely kept as a cage bird.
  • blue-ringed octopus — a highly venomous octopus, Octopus maculosus, of E Australia which exhibits blue bands on its tentacles when disturbed
  • blue-tongued lizard — a large Australian lizard, Tiliqua scincoides, characterized by having a cobalt-blue tongue.
  • board certification — the process of certifying that a physician has passed an examination and met the standards of a professional organization representing a particular medical specialty.
  • board of trade unit — a unit of electrical energy equal to 1 kilowatt-hour
  • boat-tailed grackle — a large grackle, Quiscalus major, of the southeastern U.S., that folds its tail into a shape resembling the keel of a boat.
  • bode ill (or well) — to be a bad (or good) omen
  • booker t washington — Booker T(aliaferro) [boo k-er tol-uh-ver] /ˈbʊk ər ˈtɒl ə vər/ (Show IPA), 1856–1915, U.S. reformer, educator, author, and lecturer.
  • bordering countries — countries that share a border with a particular country
  • box-office receipts — the money earned from ticket sales for a film or play
  • bracket abstraction — (compiler)   An algorithm which turns a term into a function of some variable. The result of using bracket abstraction on T with respect to variable v, written as [v]T, is a term containing no occurrences of v and denoting a function f such that f v = T. This defines the function f = (\ v . T). Using bracket abstraction and currying we can define a language without bound variables in which the only operation is monadic function application. See combinator.
  • breath of fresh air — sth new
  • breathing apparatus — an apparatus, usually consisting of tanks of air or oxygen and a mouthpiece, that enables the wearer to breath in difficult conditions such as a smoke-filled building
  • brightline spectrum — the spectrum of an incandescent substance appearing on a spectrogram as one or more bright lines against a dark background.
  • brimstone butterfly — a common yellow butterfly, Gonepteryx rhamni, of N temperate regions of the Old World: family Pieridae
  • bring into the open — to make evident or public
  • british east africa — the former British possessions of Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar, before their independence in the 1960s
  • british summer time — British Summer Time is a period in the spring and summer during which the clocks are put forward, so that people can have an extra hour of daylight in the evening.
  • british west africa — the former British possessions of Nigeria, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast, and the former trust territories of Togoland and Cameroons
  • british west indies — a former name for the states in the Caribbean that are members of the Commonwealth: the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; along with the islands which remain as United Kingdom dependencies: Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, the Turks and Caicos Islands and the British Virgin Islands
  • brokered convention — a party convention in which many delegates are pledged to favorite sons who use their blocs of votes to bargain with leading candidates who lack a majority of delegate support.
  • brush-tailed possum — any of several widely-distributed Australian possums of the genus Trichosurus
  • bug tracking system — (programming)   (BTS) A system for receiving and filing bugs reported against a software project, and tracking those bugs until they are fixed. Most major software projects have their own BTS, the source code of which is often available for use by other projects. Well known BTSs include GNATS, Bugzilla, and Debbugs.
  • buildings insurance — insurance which covers buildings
  • cable-stayed bridge — a type of suspension bridge in which the supporting cables are connected directly to the bridge deck without the use of suspenders
  • california bluebell — either of two plants, Phacelia campanularia or P. minor, of southern California, having ovate leaves and bell-shaped blue or purple flowers.
  • california job case — a job case having sufficient spaces to contain both uppercase and lowercase letters and 37 additional characters of foundry type. Compare case2 (def 8).
  • canterbury pilgrims — the pilgrims whose stories are told in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
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