18-letter words containing b, r, o, c
- clay-colored robin — any of several small Old World birds having a red or reddish breast, especially Erithacus rubecula, of Europe.
- clobbering machine — pressure to conform with accepted standards
- comb-footed spider — any of numerous spiders constituting the family Theridiidae, having a comblike row of bristles on the tarsi of the hind legs.
- combination square — an adjustable device for carpenters, used as a try square, miter square, level, etc.
- combined operation — a military operation carried out jointly by allied forces
- combustion chamber — an enclosed space in which combustion takes place, such as the space above the piston in the cylinder head of an internal-combustion engine or the chambers in a gas turbine or rocket engine in which fuel and oxidant burn
- combustion furnace — a furnace used in the laboratory to carry out elemental analysis of organic compounds
- come back to earth — to return to reality from a fantasy or daydream
- complementary base — either of the nucleotide bases linked by a hydrogen bond on opposite strands of DNA or double-stranded RNA: guanine is the complementary base of cytosine, and adenine is the complementary base of thymine in DNA and of uracil in RNA.
- composition rubber — manufactured rubber
- comprehensibleness — The quality of being comprehensible; comprehensibility.
- connected subgraph — (mathematics) A connected graph consisting of a subset of the nodes and edges of some other graph.
- controllable-pitch — (of a marine or aircraft propeller) having blades whose pitch can be changed during navigation or flight; variable-pitch.
- cool as a cucumber — very calm; self-possessed
- corpus christi bay — a bay in S Texas, at the mouth of the Nueces River.
- correspondent bank — A correspondent bank is a bank that provides services such as accepting deposits for another bank.
- creme de framboise — a liqueur flavored with raspberries.
- cumbrian mountains — a mountain range in NW England, in Cumbria. Highest peak: Scafell Pike, 977 m (3206 ft)
- cyrano de bergerac — Savinien (savinjɛ̃). 1619–55, French writer and soldier, famous as a duellist and for his large nose. He became widely known through the verse drama Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) by Edmond Rostand
- decachlorobiphenyl — (organic compound) The fully chlorinated polychlorinated biphenyl containing ten chlorine atoms.
- diamondback turtle — any edible North American terrapin of the genus Malaclemys, esp M. terrapin, occurring in brackish and tidal waters and having diamond-shaped markings on the shell: family Emydidae
- distribution class — form class
- distribution curve — the curve or line of a graph in which cumulative frequencies are plotted as ordinates and values of the variate as abscissas.
- dominican republic — a republic in the West Indies, occupying the E part of the island of Hispaniola. 19,129 sq. mi. (49,545 sq. km). Capital: Santo Domingo.
- drop in the bucket — a deep, cylindrical vessel, usually of metal, plastic, or wood, with a flat bottom and a semicircular bail, for collecting, carrying, or holding water, sand, fruit, etc.; pail.
- electronic banking — the transfer of money between financial institutions through an exchange of electronic signals over a network
- electronic mailbox — a device used to store electronic mail
- electrovalent bond — a type of chemical bond in which one atom loses an electron to form a positive ion and the other atom gains the electron to form a negative ion. The resulting ions are held together by electrostatic attraction
- embryonic membrane — any of several living membranes enclosing or closely associated with the developing vertebrate embryo, as the allantois, amnion, yolk sac, etc.
- fabric conditioner — a product used when washing clothes to make them feel softer
- fibrocartilaginous — a type of cartilage having a large number of fibers.
- file control block — (operating system) (FCB) An MS-DOS data structure that stores information about an open file. The number of FCBs is configured in CONFIG.SYS with a command FCBS=x,y where x (between 1 and 255 inclusive, default 4) specifies the number of file control blocks to allocate and therefore the number of files that MS-DOS can have open at one time. y (not needed from DOS 5.0 onward) specifies the number of files to be closed automatically if all x are in use.
- forward compatible — forward compatibility
- four-color problem — the problem, solved in 1976, of proving the theorem that any geographic map can be colored using only four colors so that no connected countries with a common boundary are colored the same color.
- garbage collection — (programming) (GC) The process by which dynamically allocated storage is reclaimed during the execution of a program. The term usually refers to automatic periodic storage reclamation by the garbage collector (part of the run-time system), as opposed to explicit code to free specific blocks of memory. Automatic garbage collection is usually triggered during memory allocation when the amount free memory falls below some threshold or after a certain number of allocations. Normal execution is suspended and the garbage collector is run. There are many variations on this basic scheme. Languages like Lisp represent expressions as graphs built from cells which contain pointers and data. These languages use automatic dynamic storage allocation to build expressions. During the evaluation of an expression it is necessary to reclaim space which is used by subexpressions but which is no longer pointed to by anything. This reclaimed memory is returned to the free memory pool for subsequent reallocation. Without garbage collection the program's memory requirements would increase monotonically throughout execution, possibly exceeding system limits on virtual memory size. The three main methods are mark-sweep garbage collection, reference counting and copying garbage collection. See also the AI koan about garbage collection.
- golden bantam corn — a horticultural variety of sweet corn having yellow kernels.
- gooseneck barnacle — goose barnacle
- gopher object type — A character specifying how to display a Gopher document. Current types are: 0 document 1 menu 2 CSO phone book entity 3 error 4 binhex binary 5 DOS binary (deprecated) 6 UU binary (deprecated) 7 index search 8 telnet connection 9 binary + duplicate server for previous object I image M MIME document T tn3270 based telnet connection c cal g GIF image h HTML s binary u {Usenet} newsgroup (1999-10-14)
- green-backed heron — a small, American heron, Butorides striatus, having glossy green wings.
- herringbone stitch — a type of cross-stitch in embroidery similar to the catch stitch in sewing, consisting of an overlapped V -shaped stitch that when worked in a continuous pattern produces a twill-weave effect.
- hexachlorobiphenyl — (organic compound) Either of forty-two isomers of the polychlorinated biphenyl containing six chlorine atoms.
- hydrofluorocarbons — Plural form of hydrofluorocarbon.
- hypophysis cerebri — the master endocrine gland, attached by a stalk to the base of the brain.
- incommensurability — not commensurable; having no common basis, measure, or standard of comparison.
- inconsiderableness — Quality of being inconsiderable.
- indecent behaviour — the offence of committing indecent acts
- indolebutyric acid — a white or yellowish, crystalline, water-insoluble powder, C 12 H 13 O 2 N, a plant hormone similar to indoleacetic acid and used for the same purposes.
- ionization chamber — a device for detecting and measuring ionizing radiation, consisting of a tube containing a low pressure gas and two electrodes between which a high voltage is maintained. The current between the electrodes is a function of the intensity of the radiation
- irreconcilableness — The quality of being irreconcilable; irreconcilability; incompatibility; incongruity.
- irreproachableness — The quality or state of being irreproachable; integrity; innocence.