20-letter words containing b, o, l, a, n
- breakfast television — Breakfast television refers to television programmes which are broadcast in the morning at the time when most people are having breakfast.
- brittle bone disease — bone disorder
- broadcast journalism — journalism as practiced in radio and television.
- brown lung (disease) — a chronic disease of the lungs caused by inhalation of fine textile fibers, esp. cotton; byssinosis
- buck's horn plantain — a Eurasian plant, Plantago coronopus, having leaves resembling a buck's horn: family Plantaginaceae
- bull in a china shop — If you say that someone rushes into a situation like a bull in a china shop, you are critical of them because they do not stop to think, and are insensitive to other people's feelings.
- by/from all accounts — If you say that something is true by all accounts or from all accounts, you believe it is true because other people say so.
- calderon de la barca — Pedro (ˈpeðro). 1600–81, Spanish dramatist, whose best-known work is La Vida es Sueño. He also wrote autos sacramentales, outdoor plays for the feast of Corpus Christi, 76 of which survive
- california barracuda — a small, slender barracuda, Sphyraena argentea, of coastal seas from Alaska to Baja California, valued as a food fish.
- call someone's bluff — to challenge someone to give proof of his claims
- can do sth blindfold — If you say that you can do something blindfold, you are emphasizing that you can do it easily, for example because you have done it many times before.
- carbocyclic compound — any of a group of organic chemical compounds in which all the atoms composing the ring are carbon atoms, as benzene or cyclopropane.
- carbohydrate loading — the practice of eating high amounts of carbohydrates, sometimes after a period of low carbohydrate intake, for several days immediately before competing in an athletic event, especially a marathon, in order to store glycogen in the body, thereby providing greater reserves of energy.
- carbon tetrachloride — a colourless volatile nonflammable sparingly soluble liquid made from chlorine and carbon disulphide; tetrachloromethane. It is used as a solvent, cleaning fluid, and insecticide. Formula: CCl4
- carry all before one — to win unanimous support or approval for oneself
- central bedfordshire — a unitary authority of S central England. Pop: 252 100 (2007 est). Area: 712 sq km (275 sq miles)
- chebyshev polynomial — a polynomial solution of the Tchebycheff equation, of the form T n (x) = cos(n cos −1 x), where n is an integer.
- checkbook journalism — the practice of paying for a news story or an interview, or for exclusive broadcasting or publishing rights.
- clean bill of health — a good report of one's physical condition
- clean-bill-of-health — a certificate, carried by a ship, attesting to the presence or absence of infectious diseases among the ship's crew and at the port from which it has come.
- compensating balance — Also, compensated balance, compensation balance. a balance wheel in a timepiece, designed to compensate for variations in tension in the hair spring caused by changes in temperature.
- constituent assembly — A constituent assembly is a body of representatives that is elected to create or change their country's constitution.
- contingent liability — a possible liability that is dependent on the outcome of a future event
- controlled substance — a drug regulated by the Federal Controlled Substances Acts, including opiates, depressants, stimulants, and hallucinogens
- disability allowance — an amount of money paid by the government to people who are unable to work because of a disability. This is a general term or, in the UK, a shorter way of referring to what is officially called the Disability Living Allowance
- distribution channel — trade: retailer
- double fertilization — the fertilization process characteristic of flowering plants, in which one sperm cell of a pollen grain fertilizes an egg cell while a second fuses with two polar nuclei to produce a triploid body that gives rise to the endosperm.
- drum and bugle corps — a marching band of drum players and buglers.
- duck-billed dinosaur — hadrosaur.
- electoral boundaries — the way that a country or area is divided for the purposes of voting in an election
- elizabeth of hungary — Saint. 1207–31, Hungarian princess who devoted herself to charity and asceticism. Feast day: Nov 17 and 19
- enabling legislation — legislation conferring certain specified powers on a person or organization
- endorsement in blank — an endorsement on a bill of exchange, cheque, etc, naming no payee and thus making the endorsed sum payable to the bearer
- environment variable — (programming, operating system) A variable that is bound in the current environment. When evaluating an expression in some environment, the evaluation of a variable consists of looking up its name in the environment and substituting its value. Most programming languages have some concept of an environment but in Unix shell scripts it has a specific meaning slightly different from other contexts. In shell scripts, environment variables are one kind of shell variable. They differ from local variables and command line arguments in that they are inheritted by a child process. Examples are the PATH variable that tells the shell the file system paths to search to find command executables and the TZ variable which contains the local time zone. The variable called "SHELL" specifies the type of shell being used. These variables are used by commands or shell scripts to discover things about the environment they are operating in. Environment variables can be changed or created by the user or a program. To see a list of environment variables type "setenv" at the csh or tcsh prompt or "set" at the sh, bash, jsh or ksh prompt. In other programming languages, e.g. functional programming languages, the environment is extended with new bindings when a function's parameters are bound to its actual arguments or when new variables are declared. In a block-structured procedural language, the environment usually consists of a linked list of activation records.
- equilibrium constant — The equilibrium constant is the ratio between the amount of reactants and the amount of product for a particular chemical reaction, used to calculate chemical behavior.
- feast of tabernacles — Sukkoth.
- fold-and-thrust belt — a linear or arcuate region of the earth's surface that has been subjected to severe folding and thrust faulting
- fontainebleau school — a group of artists, many of them Italian and Flemish, who worked on the decorations of the palace of Fontainebleau in the 16th century.
- football hooliganism — the actions or behaviour of a football hooligan
- for sb's delectation — If you do something for someone's delectation, you do it to give them enjoyment or pleasure.
- gorno-altai republic — a constituent republic of S Russia: mountainous, rising over 4350 m (14 500 ft) in the Altai Mountains of the south. Capital: Gorno-Altaisk. Pop: 202 900 (2002). Area: 92 600 sq km (35 740 sq miles)
- greatest lower bound — a lower bound that is greater than or equal to all the lower bounds of a given set: 1 is the greatest lower bound of the set consisting of 1, 2, 3. Abbreviation: glb.
- grey-crowned babbler — an insect-eating Australian bird, Pomatostomus temporalis of the family Timaliidae
- hildegard von bingen — Hildegard von (Hildegard of Bingen"Sibyl of the Rhine") 1098–1178, German nun, healer, writer, and composer.
- hudson's bay blanket — a woollen blanket with wide stripes
- hyperbolic cotangent — a hyperbolic function that is the ratio of cosh to sinh, being the reciprocal of tanh; coth
- in the public domain — able to be discussed and examined freely by the general public
- information builders — Distributors of LEVEL5 OBJECT. Telephone +1 800 969 INFO.
- job control language — a language used to construct statements that identify a particular job to be run and specify the job's requirements to the operating system under which it will run. Abbreviation: JCL.
- laboratory assistant — laboratory technician, lab assistant