16-letter words containing b, i, e, n, a
- el camino bignum — (humour) /el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ The road mundanely called El Camino Real, a road through the San Francisco peninsula that originally extended all the way down to Mexico City and many portions of which are still intact. Navigation on the San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which defines logical north and south even though it isn't really north-south many places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University. The Spanish word "real" (which has two syllables: /ray-al'/) means "royal"; El Camino Real is "the royal road". In the Fortran language, a "real" quantity is a number typically precise to seven significant digits, and a "double precision" quantity is a larger floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (other languages have similar "real" types). When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on "real", he started calling it "El Camino Double Precision" - but when the hacker was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it "El Camino Bignum", and that name has stuck. (See bignum).
- elburz mountains — a mountain range in N Iran, parallel to the SW and S shores of the Caspian Sea. Highest peak: Mount Demavend, 5671 m (18 606 ft)
- electric blanket — electrically-heated bedcover
- embarkation card — an official document that allows travellers to leave a country by boarding a ship or plane
- emotional labour — work that requires good interpersonal skills
- endocannabinoids — Plural form of endocannabinoid.
- erymanthian boar — a wild boar that ravaged the district around Mount Erymanthus: captured by Hercules as his fourth labour
- exhibition match — a sports match which is not part of a competition but instead serves the function of demonstrating the skills of the players
- expansion bottle — a tank collecting coolant from a radiator while an engine is heated, and from which the coolant returns to the radiator when the engine cools
- experience table — an actuarial table, esp a mortality table based on past statistics
- fashion business — the business dealing with style in clothes, cosmetics, behaviour, etc, esp the latest or most admired style
- fibonacci number — a number in the Fibonacci sequence, each of which is the sum of the previous two
- fibonacci series — a sequence of integers in which each integer (Fibonacci number) after the second is the sum of the two preceding integers; specif., the series 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, . . .
- fisherman's bend — a knot made by taking a round turn on the object to which the rope is to be fastened, passing the end of the rope around the standing part and under the round turn, and securing the end.
- flabbergastation — (colloquial) Bewildered shock or surprise; the state or condition of being flabbergasted.
- flabbergastingly — Surprisingly, astonishingly or amazingly.
- flying ambulance — an aircraft used to take sick or injured people to hospital
- forbid the banns — to raise an objection to a marriage announced in this way
- forced vibration — Forced vibration is a type of vibration in which a force is repeatedly applied to a mechanical system.
- fortin barometer — an adjustable cistern barometer, the most common of those employing mercury.
- frontier orbital — the highest-energy occupied orbital or lowest-energy unoccupied orbital in a molecule. Such orbitals have a large influence on chemical properties
- galvanic battery — battery (def 1a).
- gas blowoff line — A gas blowoff line is a safety device to control sudden increases in pressure.
- generalisability — Non-Oxford British standard spelling of generalizability.
- generalizability — The quality of being generalizable.
- gingerbread palm — doom palm.
- gingerbread plum — a tree, Neocarya macrophylla, of western Africa, bearing a large, edible, starchy fruit.
- gingerbread tree — a W African tree, Parinari macrophyllum, with large mealy edible fruits (gingerbread plums): family Chrysobalanaceae
- globigerina ooze — a calcareous deposit occurring upon ocean beds and consisting mainly of the shells of dead foraminifers, especially globigerina.
- granville-barker — Harley, 1877–1946, English dramatist, actor, and critic.
- grin and bear it — to suffer trouble or hardship without complaint
- hanging wardrobe — a wardrobe containing a rail with a large amount of space underneath, so that clothes can be hung on hangers placed onto the rail
- harleian library — a large library of manuscripts collected by the British statesman Robert Harley and his son and now housed in the British Museum.
- have no business — an occupation, profession, or trade: His business is poultry farming.
- hebbian learning — (artificial intelligence) The most common way to train a neural network; a kind of unsupervised learning; named after canadian neuropsychologist, Donald O. Hebb. The algorithm is based on Hebb's Postulate, which states that where one cell's firing repeatedly contributes to the firing of another cell, the magnitude of this contribution will tend to increase gradually with time. This means that what may start as little more than a coincidental relationship between the firing of two nearby neurons becomes strongly causal. Despite limitations with Hebbian learning, e.g., the inability to learn certain patterns, variations such as Signal Hebbian Learning and Differential Hebbian Learning are still used.
- hemangioblastoma — (medicine) Any of several benign neoplasm tumours of the brain.
- herringbone gear — a helical gear having teeth that lie on the pitch cylinder in a V -shaped form so that one half of each tooth is on a right-handed helix and the other half on a left-handed helix.
- horseback riding — activity: riding a horse
- humanly possible — feasible, practical
- huntington beach — a city in SW California, SE of Los Angeles.
- hyaloid membrane — the delicate, pellucid, and nearly structureless membrane enclosing the vitreous humor of the eye.
- hydration number — the number of molecules of water with which an ion can combine in an aqueous solution of given concentration.
- icterine warbler — a European variety of tree warbler (Hippolais icterina )
- imaginary number — Also called imaginary, pure imaginary number. a complex number having its real part equal to zero.
- immeasurableness — The state or condition of being immeasurable.
- impenetrableness — The quality of being impenetrable.
- imperishableness — The characteristic or property of being imperishable.
- in the same boat — a vessel for transport by water, constructed to provide buoyancy by excluding water and shaped to give stability and permit propulsion.
- inaccessibleness — The quality or state of being inaccessible or unreachable.
- inapplicableness — The state or quality of being inapplicable; inapplicability.