15-letter words containing b, e, r, s
- basic autocoder — Early system on IBM 7070. Listed in CACM 2(5):16 (May 1959).
- basse-normandie — a region of NW France, on the English Channel: consists of the Cherbourg peninsula in the west rising to the Normandy hills in the east; mainly agricultural
- basses-pyrenees — former name of Pyrénées-Atlantiques.
- bathroom scales — scales typically kept in a bathroom for people to weigh themselves
- battleship gray — a subdued bluish gray.
- bayeux tapestry — an 11th- or 12th-century embroidery in Bayeux, nearly 70.5 m (231 ft) long by 50 cm (20 inches) high, depicting the Norman conquest of England
- be short on sth — If someone or something is short on a particular good quality, they do not have as much of it as you think they should have.
- be snowed under — to be overwhelmed, esp with paperwork
- be spoiling for — to have an aggressive desire for (a fight, etc)
- bear comparison — to be sufficiently similar in class or range to be compared with (something else), esp favourably
- béarnaise sauce — a creamy sauce, esp. for meat or fish, made of butter and egg yolks and flavored with wine, vinegar, shallots, and herbs
- beast of burden — A beast of burden is an animal such as an ox or a donkey that is used for carrying or pulling things.
- bedford heights — a town in N Ohio.
- bedroom slipper — a soft shoe worn in the house
- beef stroganoff — a dish of thin strips of beef cooked with onions, mushrooms, and seasonings, served in a sour-cream sauce
- before the mast — as an apprentice seaman
- beginner's luck — the initial good fortune or success commonly supposed to come to a person who has recently taken up a new pursuit, as a sport or game: Catching a large trout the first time you go fishing is simply beginner's luck.
- belief revision — (artificial intelligence) The area of theory change in which preservation of the information in the theory to be changed plays a key role. A fundamental issue in belief revision is how to decide what information to retract in order to maintain consistency, when the addition of a new belief to a theory would make it inconsistent. Usually, an ordering on the sentences of the theory is used to determine priorities among sentences, so that those with lower priority can be retracted. This ordering can be difficult to generate and maintain. The postulates of the AGM Theory for Belief Revision describe minimal properties a revision process should have.
- belt-and-braces — providing double security, in case one security measure should fail
- ben day process — a method of adding texture, shading, or detail to line drawings by overlaying a transparent sheet of dots or any other pattern during platemaking
- berenice's hair — the constellation Coma Berenices
- bergius process — a method of hydrogenation formerly used with coal to produce an oil similar to petroleum.
- berkeley castle — a castle in Gloucestershire: scene of the murder of Edward II in 1327
- berkshire hills — region of wooded hills in W Mass.: resort area
- beside the mark — not striking the point aimed at
- beta conversion — (theory) A term from lambda-calculus for beta reduction or beta abstraction.
- beurre noisette — a sauce of butter cooked until golden or nut brown, sometimes flavored with capers, vinegar, herbs, etc.
- bias (ply) tire — a motor vehicle tire having a foundation of plies of rubberized cords in a crisscross pattern of lines diagonal to the center line of the tread
- big sandy creek — a river in central Colorado, flowing NE and SE to the Arkansas River near Lamar: site of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre. 200 miles (322 km) long.
- binomial series — an infinite series obtained by expanding a binomial raised to a power that is not a positive integer.
- biodestructible — biodegradable
- biogeochemistry — the science of biological, chemical, and geological aspects of the environment
- bird of passage — If you refer to someone as a bird of passage, you mean that they are staying in a place for a short time before going to another place.
- bird's eye view — You say that you have a bird's eye view of a place when you are looking down at it from a great height, so that you can see a long way but everything looks very small.
- bits per second — (communications, unit) (bps, b/s) The unit in which data rate is measured. For example, a modem's data rate is usually measured in kilobits per second. In 1996, the maximum modem speed for use on the PSTN was 33.6 kbps, rising to 56 kbps in 1997. Note that kilo- (k), mega- (M), etc. in data rates denote powers of 1000, not 1024.
- bittersweetness — the quality of being bittersweet
- black raspberry — a plant, Rubus occidentalis, of E North America, that has black berry-like fruits
- black sea bream — a sparid fish, Spondyliosoma cantharus, found in N Europe and the Mediterranean
- black september — a Palestinian Terrorist group, responsible for the assassinations of Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games at Munich in 1972
- black snakeroot — a tall bugbane, Cimicifuga racemosa, of the buttercup family, of eastern North America, having thin, tapering, toothed or deeply cut leaflets and branched clusters of small, white flowers.
- blackberry bush — a bush on which blackberries grow
- blasting powder — a form of gunpowder made with sodium nitrate instead of saltpeter, used chiefly for blasting rock, ore, etc.
- blessed trinity — Trinity (def 1).
- blocked records — (storage) Several records written as a contiguous block on magnetic tape so that they may be accessed in a single I/O operation. Blocking increases the amount of data that may be stored on a tape because there are fewer inter-block gaps. It requires that the tape drive or processor have a sufficiently large buffer to store the whole block.
- blood corpuscle — one of the cells in the blood
- bloody butchers — a hardy plant, Trillium sessile, common from New York to Georgia and westward, having stalkless, purple or green flowers.
- blossom-end rot — a disease of tomato and pepper caused by a deficiency of calcium, characterized by decay at the blossom end of the fruit.
- blow one's cork — to lose one's temper; become enraged
- blow one's horn — to boast about oneself; brag
- blue wood aster — a composite plant, Aster cordifolius, of North America, having heart-shaped leaves and pale-blue flowers.