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16-letter words containing b, s

  • be of assistance — Someone or something that is of assistance to you is helpful or useful to you.
  • be one's own man — to be independent or free
  • bear one's cross — a structure consisting essentially of an upright and a transverse piece, used to execute persons in ancient times.
  • bearing pedestal — an independent support for a bearing, usually incorporating a bearing housing
  • bearish tendency — a tendency for share prices to fall
  • beauty therapist — a person whose job is to carry out treatments to improve a person's appearance, such as facials, manicures, removal of unwanted hair, etc
  • beaux' stratagem — a comedy (1707) by George Farquhar.
  • bed-sitting room — a combined bedroom and sitting room serving as a one-room apartment
  • beefsteak fungus — an edible reddish bracket fungus, Fistulina hepatica, that grows esp on oak trees and oozes a bloodlike juice
  • beefsteak tomato — a very large fleshy variety of tomato
  • beg the question — If you say that something begs a particular question, you mean that it makes people want to ask that question; some people consider that this use is incorrect.
  • behavioural sink — a small area in which people or animals live in overcrowded conditions
  • behind the times — You can use the times to refer to the present time and to modern fashions, tastes, and developments. For example, if you say that someone keeps up with the times, you mean they are fashionable or aware of modern developments. If you say they are behind the times, you mean they are unfashionable or not aware of them.
  • belgian malinois — one of a Belgian breed of medium-sized dogs having a short coat, tan to dark brown in color, a black mask, and erect ears, bred originally as a sheepherding dog.
  • belgian sheepdog — any of a Belgian breed of large herding dog with a black coat, sometimes used as a guide dog
  • bells of ireland — an annual garden plant, Moluccella laevis, whose flowers have a green cup-shaped calyx: family Lamiaceae (labiates)
  • belted-bias tire — a motor-vehicle tire of the same construction as a bias-ply tire but with an added belt of steel or a strong synthetic material under the tread.
  • benito mussolini — Benito [buh-nee-toh;; Italian be-nee-taw] /bəˈni toʊ;; Italian bɛˈni tɔ/ (Show IPA), (I"Il Duce") 1883–1945, Italian Fascist leader: premier of Italy 1922–43.
  • benoit samuelson — Joan (Joan Benoit) born 1957, U.S. distance runner: first Olympic marathon women's winner, 1984.
  • benzoate of soda — sodium benzoate
  • berners-lee, tim — Tim Berners-Lee
  • bertillon system — a system formerly in use for identifying persons, esp criminals, by means of a detailed record of physical characteristics
  • bertrand russell — (person)   (1872-1970) A British mathematician, the discoverer of Russell's paradox.
  • beside the point — If you say that something is beside the point, you mean that it is not relevant to the subject that you are discussing.
  • bessemer process — (formerly) a process for producing steel by blowing air through molten pig iron at about 1250°C in a Bessemer converter: silicon, manganese, and phosphorus impurities are removed and the carbon content is controlled
  • best-before date — a date on packaged food indicating how long it is safe to keep it
  • beta abstraction — [lambda-calculus] The conversion of an expression to an application of a lambda abstraction to an argument expression. Some subterm of the original expression becomes the argument of the abstraction and the rest becomes its body. E.g. 4+1 --> (\ x . x+1) 4 The opposite of beta abstraction is beta reduction. These are the two kinds of beta conversion.
  • bias-belted tire — belted-bias tire.
  • bicapitalisation — The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as PostScript, NeXT, NeWS, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalisation. Too many marketroid types think this sort of thing is really cute, even the 2,317th time they do it. Compare studlycaps.
  • big bag of pages — (BIBOP) Where data objects are tagged with some kind of descriptor (giving their size or type for example) memory can be saved by storing objects with the same descriptor in one "page" of memory. The most significant bits of an object's address are used as the BIBOP page number. This is looked up in a BIBOP table to find the descriptor for all objects in that page. This idea is similar to the "zones" used in some Lisp systems (e.g. LeLisp).
  • bihar and orissa — a former province of NE India: now divided into the states of Bihar and Odisha (formerly Orissa).
  • biliary calculus — an abnormal stonelike mass, usually of cholesterol, formed in the gallbladder or bile passages.
  • bimetallic strip — a strip consisting of two metals of different coefficients of expansion welded together so that it buckles on heating: used in thermostats, etc
  • binet-simon test — an intelligence test that consists of questions, problems, and things to do, graded in terms of mental age
  • binocular fusion — fusion (def 5a).
  • binocular-fusion — the act or process of fusing; the state of being fused.
  • biometeorologist — the scientific study of the effects of natural or artificial atmospheric conditions, as temperature and humidity, on living organisms.
  • bipolar disorder — Bipolar disorder is a mental illness in which a person's state of mind changes between extreme happiness and extreme depression.
  • bird of paradise — A bird of paradise is a songbird which is found mainly in New Guinea. The male birds have very brightly coloured feathers.
  • bird's-eye maple — a cut of sugar maple wood used especially for veneers, having a wavy grain with many dark, circular markings.
  • bird's-nest fern — a tropical fern, Asplenium nidus, having fronds arranged in clumps resembling a bird's nest.
  • bird's-nest soup — a rich spicy Chinese soup made from the outer part of the nests of SE Asian swifts of the genus Collocalia
  • bird-of-paradise — Also called bird-of-paradise flower. any of several plants of the genus Strelitzia, native to southern Africa, especially S. reginae, having a large, showy orange and blue inflorescence.
  • birthday honours — (in Britain) honorary titles conferred on the official birthday of the sovereign
  • birthday present — a gift given to someone on their birthday
  • bismarck herring — marinaded herring, served cold
  • bite one's nails — to chew off the ends of one's fingernails
  • black nightshade — a poisonous solanaceous plant, Solanum nigrum, a common weed in cultivated land, having small white flowers with backward-curved petals and black berry-like fruits
  • black-eyed susan — any of several North American plants of the genus Rudbeckia, esp R. hirta, having flower heads of orange-yellow rays and brown-black centres: family Asteraceae (composites)
  • blasting gelatin — a type of plastic dynamite containing about 7 percent of a cellulose nitrate, used chiefly in underwater work.
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