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19-letter words containing b, n

  • 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.
  • binding arbitration — dispute resolution
  • binocular disparity — the small differences in the positions of the parts of the images falling on each eye that results when each eye views the scene from a slightly different position; these differences make stereoscopic vision possible
  • 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
  • black carpenter ant — a large, black ant, Camponotus pennsylvanicus, that lives in damp wood in nature or in houses, where it can cause considerable damage by boring or tunneling.
  • blind carbon (copy) — a carbon copy of a letter sent to someone other than the addressee, with no indication on the original letter that such a copy has been sent
  • 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
  • bloodstock industry — the breeding and training of racehorses
  • bloody-nosed beetle — a beetle, Timarcha tenebricosa, that exudes bright red blood when alarmed: family Chrysomelidae
  • blot one's copybook — to spoil one's reputation by making a mistake, offending against social customs, etc
  • blow one's own horn — If you blow your own horn, you boast about yourself.
  • blow someone's mind — (of a drug, esp LSD) to alter someone's mental state
  • blow the whistle on — to make a clear musical sound, a series of such sounds, or a high-pitched, warbling sound by the forcible expulsion of the breath through a small opening formed by contracting the lips, or through the teeth, with the aid of the tongue.
  • 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-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
  • 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
  • born out of wedlock — born when one's parents are not legally married
  • bound hand and foot — with hands and feet tied
  • boundary commission — (in Britain) a body established by statute to undertake periodic reviews of the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies and to recommend changes to take account of population shifts
  • 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.
  • brand contamination — the process by which the reputation of a particular brand or product becomes tarnished by adverse publicity
  • brazen law of wages — the doctrine or theory that wages tend toward a level sufficient only to maintain a subsistence standard of living.
  • 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
  • briggsian logarithm — common logarithm.
  • bright young things — young, fun-loving, fashionable upper-class people, esp of the 1920s
  • 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 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.
  • brown paper bag bug — (programming)   A programming bug that is so stupid that it makes the programmer want to put a brown paper bag over his head.
  • 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.
  • building contractor — an individual or company that contracts for the construction of houses, etc
  • buildings insurance — insurance which covers buildings
  • bulbourethral gland — Cowper's gland
  • business accounting — the keeping of detailed accounts relating to a business or businesses
  • buster brown collar — a medium-sized, starched collar with rounded edges, lying flat on the shoulders, worn by women and girls.
  • buy a pig in a poke — to buy, get, or agree to something without sight or knowledge of it in advance
  • by leaps and bounds — with unexpectedly rapid progess
  • by one's bootstraps — by one's own efforts; unaided
  • 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
  • captain abstraction — The champion of the principles of abstraction and modularity, who protects unwary students on MIT's course 6.001 from the nefarious designs of Sergeant Spaghetticode and his vile concrete programming practices. See also spaghetti code.
  • carbon dioxide snow — solid carbon dioxide, used as a refrigerant
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