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16-letter words containing b, o, p

  • black woodpecker — a large woodpecker, Dryocopus martius, found in parts of Eurasia and Africa
  • bleaching powder — a white powder with the odour of chlorine, consisting of chlorinated calcium hydroxide with an approximate formula CaCl(OCl).4H2O. It is used in solution as a bleaching agent and disinfectant
  • blink comparator — an optical instrument used to detect small differences in two photographs of the same field or object by viewing them alternately, switching rapidly from one to the other.
  • bloomsbury group — a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals living and working in and around Bloomsbury in London from about 1907 to 1930. Influenced by the philosophy of G. E. Moore, they included Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and John Maynard Keynes
  • board of pardons — an agency that determines which prisoners are to be released on parole or discretionary mandatory supervision and recommends pardons
  • boatswain's pipe — a whistle used formerly to give orders on board ship
  • bombing campaign — a concerted, intensive and prolonged bombing of a target
  • boolean-operator — any operation in which each of the operands and the result take one of two values.
  • bootstrap loader — (operating system)   A short program loaded from non-volatile storage and used to bootstrap a computer. On early computers great efforts were expended on making the bootstrap loader short, in order to make it easy to toggle in via the front panel switches. It was just clever enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from punched cards or paper tape), to which it handed control. This program in turn read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer "pulled itself up by its bootstraps" to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap loader is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the "boot block". When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it. A diskless workstation can use bootp to load its OS from the network.
  • bootstrap memory — memory that allows new programs to be entered because some simple preliminary instructions or information are already built in.
  • boston cream pie — a cake of two layers with icing and a creamy filling
  • boston tea party — a raid in 1773 made by citizens of Boston (disguised as Indians) on three British ships in the harbour as a protest against taxes on tea and the monopoly given to the East India Company. The contents of several hundred chests of tea were dumped into the harbour
  • bound up in/with — If one thing is bound up with or in another, they are closely connected with each other, and it is difficult to consider the two things separately.
  • boundary dispute — dispute between neighbours about the boundary between their properties
  • bouquet larkspur — a plant, Delphinium grandiflorum, of eastern Asia, having blue or whitish flowers and hairy fruit.
  • bowman's capsule — a membranous, double-walled capsule surrounding a glomerulus of a nephron.
  • brain aid prolog — (language)   (BAP) A parallel Prolog environment for transputer systems by Frank Bergmann <[email protected]>, Martin Ostermann <[email protected]>, and Guido von Walter <[email protected]> of Brain Aid Systems GbR. BAP is based on a model of communicating sequential Prolog processes. The run-time system consists of a multi-process operating system with support for several applications running concurrently.
  • brake horsepower — the rate at which an engine does work, expressed in horsepower. It is measured by the resistance of an applied brake
  • branchiopneustic — breathing by means of gills, as certain aquatic insect larvae.
  • break-even point — When a company reaches break-even point, the money it makes from the sale of goods or services is just enough to cover the cost of supplying those goods or services, but not enough to make a profit.
  • bristlecone pine — a coniferous tree, Pinus aristata, of the western US, bearing cones with bristle-like prickles: one of the longest-lived trees, useful in radiocarbon dating
  • broadloom carpet — any carpet woven on a wide loom and not having seams, especially one wider than 54 inches (137 cm).
  • brompton mixture — a mixture of narcotics, tranquilizers, and alcohol, used to kill pain for terminally ill patients
  • bronchopneumonia — inflammation of the lungs, originating in the bronchioles
  • brood parasitism — a type of parasitism in which a bird (brood parasite), as a cowbird or European cuckoo, lays and abandons its eggs in the nest of another species
  • broomrape family — the plant family Orobanchaceae, characterized by scaly, leafless herbaceous plants that are parasitic on the roots of other plants and have irregular flowers and many-seeded capsular fruit, and including beechdrops, broomrape, and squawroot.
  • brothel-creepers — soft-soled men's shoes that were originally popular in the 1950s
  • bulletproof vest — a protective garment
  • bumper to bumper — If traffic is bumper to bumper, the vehicles are so close to one another that they are almost touching and are moving very slowly.
  • bumper-to-bumper — marked by a long line of cars moving slowly or with many stops and starts, one behind the other: bumper-to-bumper traffic.
  • burkitt lymphoma — a rare type of tumour of the white blood cells, occurring mainly in Africa and associated with infection by Epstein-Barr virus
  • burnt-tip orchid — a small orchid, Orchis ustulata, resembling the lady orchid, having dark reddish-brown hoods that give a burnt look to the tip of the flower spike
  • bust one's chops — Usually, chops. the jaw.
  • button one's lip — to stop talking: often imperative
  • bypass capacitor — a capacitor which provides a low-impedance path for alternating current while not passing any direct current
  • bypass operation — an operation involving redirection of blood flow, either to avoid a diseased blood vessel or in order to perform heart surgery
  • cabbage palmetto — a tropical American fan palm, Sabal palmetto, with edible leaf buds and leaves used in thatching
  • can-not help but — to give or provide what is necessary to accomplish a task or satisfy a need; contribute strength or means to; render assistance to; cooperate effectively with; aid; assist: He planned to help me with my work. Let me help you with those packages.
  • capacity booking — a time when someone has booked the whole of a venue or the maximum amount of something available
  • capsule wardrobe — a collection of clothes and accessories that includes only items considered essential
  • carbon footprint — Your carbon footprint is a measure of the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by your activities over a particular period.
  • carbonless paper — a sheet of paper impregnated with dye which transfers writing or typing onto the copying surface below without the necessity for carbon pigment
  • carboxypeptidase — any of several digestive enzymes that catalyze the removal of an amino acid from the end of a peptide chain having a free carbonyl group.
  • cerebellopontine — (anatomy) Relating to the cerebellum and pons.
  • chernobyl packet — (networking)   /cher-noh'b*l pak'*t/ A network packet that induces a broadcast storm and/or network meltdown, named in memory of the April 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine. The typical scenario involves an IP Ethernet datagram that passes through a gateway with both source and destination Ethernet address and IP address set as the respective broadcast addresses for the subnetworks being gated between. Compare Christmas tree packet.
  • chomp at the bit — champ at the bit (see phrase under champ1)
  • cobra de capello — a cobra, Naja tripudians, that has ringlike markings on the body and exists in many varieties in S and SE Asia
  • common spoonbill — a wading bird of warm regions, Platalea leucorodia, having a long horizontally flattened bill: family Threskiornithidae, order Ciconiiformes
  • commonplace book — a notebook in which quotations, poems, remarks, etc, that catch the owner's attention are entered
  • companionability — The state of being companionable, suitability for companionship.
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