18-letter words containing b, e, t, a, i
- deferred liability — income received in advance and carried forward as a liability until the associated goods, services, or benefits are delivered
- demand liabilities — the assets of a financial institution that are demandable by depositors
- dependent variable — a variable in a mathematical equation or statement whose value depends on that taken on by the independent variable
- depository library — a library designated by law to receive without charge all or a selection of the official publications of a government.
- devil's paintbrush — a perennial European hawkweed (Hieracium aurantiacum) with leafless flower stalks bearing a cluster of orange-red heads: now a common weed in N U.S. and Canada
- diabetes insipidus — a disorder of the pituitary gland causing excessive thirst and excretion of large quantities of dilute urine
- diamondback turtle — any edible North American terrapin of the genus Malaclemys, esp M. terrapin, occurring in brackish and tidal waters and having diamond-shaped markings on the shell: family Emydidae
- disability pension — a pension paid to people who are unable to continue to work because of a disability
- dispersible tablet — A dispersible tablet is a tablet that disintegrates in water or other liquid.
- double achievement — a representation of the arms of a husband beside those of his wife such that a difference of rank between them is shown.
- dressing table set — a set including a hairbrush, mirror and comb, often with silver backs
- 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
- 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.
- established church — a Church that is officially recognized as a national institution, esp the Church of England
- establishmentarian — Adhering to, advocating, or relating to the principle of an established church.
- fabric conditioner — a product used when washing clothes to make them feel softer
- 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-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.
- flat file database — (database) A database containing a single table, stored in a single flat file, often in a human-readable format such as comma-separated values or fixed-width columns.
- flat-bottomed rail — a rail having a cross section like an inverted T, with the top extremity enlarged slightly to form the head
- forward compatible — forward compatibility
- fragmentation bomb — a bomb designed to break into many small, high-velocity fragments when detonated.
- 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.
- gas-discharge tube — any tube in which an electric discharge takes place through a gas
- 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
- give sb their head — If you give someone their head, you allow them to do what they want to do, without trying to advise or stop them.
- golden gate bridge — a bridge connecting N California with San Francisco peninsula. 4200-foot (1280-meter) center span.
- great barrier reef — coral structure off Australian coast
- hamilton's problem — Hamiltonian problem
- handkerchief table — corner table.
- have a thing about — If you have a thing about someone or something, you have very strong feelings about them.
- have words with sb — If one person has words with another, or if two or more people have words, they have a serious discussion or argument, especially because one has complained about the other's behaviour.
- have/be to do with — If you say that one thing has something to do with or is something to do with another thing, you mean that the two things are connected or that the first thing is about the second thing.
- hawksbill (turtle) — a medium-sized marine turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata, family Cheloniidae) having a hawklike beak and a horny shell from which tortoise shell is obtained
- heat of combustion — the heat evolved when one mole of a substance is burnt in oxygen at constant volume
- hermaphrodite brig — a two-masted sailing vessel, square-rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft-rigged on the mainmast.
- 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.
- in black and white — without colour
- 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.
- 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
- individual liberty — the liberty of an individual to exercise freely those rights generally accepted as being outside of governmental control.