17-letter words containing b, h
- belted kingfisher — a grayish-blue, North American kingfisher, Ceryle alcyon, having a white breast marked with a grayish-blue band.
- bent out of shape — very angry, upset, or agitated
- bergisch gladbach — city in W Germany, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia: pop. 105,000
- bergisch-gladbach — an industrial city in W Germany, near Cologne.
- best first search — (algorithm) A graph search algorithm which optimises breadth first search by ordering all current paths according to some heuristic. The heuristic attempts to predict how close the end of a path is to a solution. Paths which are judged to be closer to a solution are extended first. See also beam search, hill climbing.
- bighorn mountains — range of the Rocky Mountains in N Wyo. and S Mont.: highest peak, 13,165 ft (4,013 m)
- biological father — the man whose semen fertilized the ovum from which a child was born
- biological mother — the mother who gave birth to a child
- biological rhythm — biorhythm.
- biological shield — a protective shield impervious to radiation, esp the thick concrete wall surrounding the core of a nuclear reactor
- biopharmaceutical — of or relating to drugs produced using biotechnology
- bird's-eye chilli — a small red hot-tasting chilli
- birth certificate — Your birth certificate is an official document which gives details of your birth, such as the date and place of your birth, and the names of your parents.
- birth of a nation — an American film (1915), directed by D. W. Griffith.
- black huckleberry — a low eastern North American shrub, Gaylussacia baccata, of the heath family, having yellowish-green leaves with resinous dots on the underside, clustered orange-red flowers, and shiny, black, edible fruit.
- black-headed gull — a small gull, Chroicocephalus ridibundus, that breeds in much of Europe and Asia, and often scavenges in towns
- blackcurrant bush — a bush of the blackcurrant plant
- blasphemous libel — In Britain, previously, the crime committed if a person insults, offends, or vilifies the deity, Christ, or the Christian religion
- blood and thunder — A blood and thunder performer or performance is very loud and emotional.
- blood cholesterol — a measurement of the amount of cholesterol in someone's blood
- blood-and-thunder — sensationalism, violence, or exaggerated melodrama: a movie full of blood and thunder.
- blow hot and cold — to vacillate
- blue-headed vireo — solitary vireo.
- blue-sky thinking — Blue-sky thinking is the activity of trying to find completely new ideas.
- board-and-shingle — a small dwelling with wooden walls and a shingle roof
- boat-billed heron — a nocturnal, tropical American wading bird (Cochlearius cochlearius) with a large, broad bill: it is the only member of a family (Cochleariidae) of wading birds
- boatswain's chair — a seat consisting of a short flat board slung from ropes, used to support a person working on the side of a vessel or in its rigging
- bohemian brethren — a Protestant Christian sect formed in the 15th century from various Hussite groups, which rejected oaths and military service and advocated a pure and disciplined spiritual life. It was reorganized in 1722 as the Moravian Church
- boiler horsepower — a unit of measurement of the ability of a boiler to evaporate water, usually given as the ability to evaporate 34½ pounds (15.6 kg) of water an hour, into dry saturated steam from and at 212°F (100°C).
- boothia peninsula — a peninsula of N Canada: the northernmost part of the mainland of North America, lying west of the Gulf of Boothia, an arm of the Arctic Ocean
- bottlebrush grass — a North American grass, Hystrix patula, having loose flower spikes with long awns.
- brain haemorrhage — bleeding into the brain
- branch delay slot — delayed control-transfer
- branch prediction — (processor, algorithm) A technique used in some processors with instruction prefetch to guess whether a conditional branch will be taken or not and prefetch code from the appropriate location. When a branch instruction is executed, its address and that of the next instruction executed (the chosen destination of the branch) are stored in the Branch Target Buffer. This information is used to predict which way the instruction will branch the next time it is executed so that instruction prefetch can continue. When the prediction is correct (and it is over 90% of the time), executing a branch does not cause a pipeline break. Some later CPUs simply prefetch both paths instead of trying to predict which way the branch will go. An extension of the idea of branch prediction is speculative execution.
- brazilian rhatany — See under rhatany (def 1).
- breach of promise — (formerly) failure to carry out one's promise to marry
- break one's heart — to grieve or cause to grieve very deeply, esp through love
- break the back of — to complete the greatest or hardest part of (a task)
- breathe life into — revive, rejuvenate
- brezhnev doctrine — the doctrine expounded by Leonid Brezhnev in November 1968 affirming the right of the Soviet Union to intervene in the affairs of Communist countries to strengthen Communism.
- brightening agent — a compound applied to a textile to increase its brightness by the conversion of ultraviolet radiation to visible (blue) light, used in detergents
- brighton and hove — a city and unitary authority in S England, in East Sussex. Pop: 251 500 (2003 est). Area: 72 sq km (28 sq miles)
- bring up the rear — to be at the back in a procession, race, etc
- british cameroons — a former British trust territory of West Africa
- british columbian — of or relating to British Columbia or its inhabitants
- british israelite — a member of a religious movement claiming that the British people are descended from the lost tribes of Israel
- british shorthair — a breed of large cat with a short dense coat
- british-cameroons — German Kamerun. a region in W Africa: a German protectorate 1884–1919; divided in 1919 into British and French mandates.
- broad-winged hawk — an American hawk, Buteo platypterus, dark brown above and white barred with rufous below.
- broadview heights — a town in N Ohio.