12-letter words containing c, a, b
- bullock cart — a cart pulled by one or two bullocks
- bumping race — (esp at Oxford and Cambridge) a race in which rowing eights start an equal distance one behind the other and each tries to bump the boat in front
- bunco artist — a confidence trickster or con artist
- buoyancy aid — a type of usually foam-filled lifejacket designed for use in sports such as canoeing
- bureaucratic — Bureaucratic means involving complicated rules and procedures which can cause long delays.
- burseraceous — of, relating to, or belonging to the Burseraceae, a tropical family of trees and shrubs having compound leaves and resin or balsam in their stems. The family includes bdellium and some balsams
- bushwhacking — to make one's way through woods by cutting at undergrowth, branches, etc.
- butter sauce — a sauce made of melted butter, often diluted with water, sometimes thickened with flour or egg yolk, or both, and seasoned with lemon juice.
- butyric acid — type of acid
- c beautifier — (cb) A Unix tool for reformatting C source code.
- cabalistical — cabalistic
- cabbage moth — a common brownish noctuid moth, Mamestra brassicae, the larva of which is destructive of cabbages and other plants
- cabbage palm — a West Indian palm, Roystonea (or Oreodoxa) oleracea, whose leaf buds are eaten like cabbage
- cabbage rose — a rose, Rosa centifolia, with a round compact full-petalled head
- cabbage tree — a tree, Cordyline australis, of New Zealand having a tall branchless trunk and a palmlike top
- cabinet wine — cabinet (def 10).
- cabinet-wine — a piece of furniture with shelves, drawers, etc., for holding or displaying items: a curio cabinet; a file cabinet.
- cabinetmaker — A cabinetmaker is a person who makes high-quality wooden furniture.
- cable length — a unit of length in nautical use that has various values, including 100 fathoms (600 feet)
- cable stitch — a pattern or series of knitting stitches producing a design like a twisted rope
- cable-laying — involved in or connected to the activity of laying cables
- cable-stitch — a series of stitches used in knitting to produce a cable effect.
- cablecasting — relating to broadcasting by cable
- cabora bassa — the site on the Zambezi River in N Mozambique of the largest dam in southern Africa
- cabot strait — a channel in Canada, connecting the Gulf of St. Lawrence with the Atlantic Ocean. 68 miles (109 km) wide.
- cabriole leg — a type of furniture leg, popular in the first half of the 18th century, in which an upper convex curve descends tapering to a concave curve
- cacao butter — cocoa butter
- cactoblastis — a moth, Cactoblastis cactorum of South America, that was introduced into Australia to act as a biological control on the prickly pear
- cadet branch — the family or family branch of a younger son
- caked breast — a painful hardening of one or more lobules of a lactating breast, caused by stagnation of milk in the secreting ducts and accumulation of blood in the expanded veins; stagnation mastitis.
- calabar bean — the dark brown very poisonous seed of a leguminous woody climbing plant, Physostigma venenosum, of tropical Africa, used as a source of the drug physostigmine
- calabrasella — a card game for three persons that is played with a 40-card pack made by removing the eights, nines, and tens from a regular 52-card pack.
- calculatable — Able to be calculated; calculable.
- calibrations — Plural form of calibration.
- call-by-name — (reduction) (CBN) (Normal order reduction, leftmost, outermost reduction). An argument passing convention (first provided by ALGOL 60?) where argument expressions are passed unevaluated. This is usually implemented by passing a pointer to a thunk - some code which will return the value of the argument and an environment giving the values of its free variables. This evaluation strategy is guaranteed to reach a normal form if one exists. When used to implement functional programming languages, call-by-name is usually combined with graph reduction to avoid repeated evaluation of the same expression. This is then known as call-by-need. The opposite of call-by-name is call-by-value where arguments are evaluated before they are passed to a function. This is more efficient but is less likely to terminate in the presence of infinite data structures and recursive functions. Arguments to macros are usually passed using call-by-name.
- call-by-need — (reduction) A reduction strategy which delays evaluation of function arguments until their values are needed. A value is needed if it is an argument to a primitive function or it is the condition in a conditional. Call-by-need is one aspect of lazy evaluation. The term first appears in Chris Wadsworth's thesis "Semantics and Pragmatics of the Lambda calculus" (Oxford, 1971, p. 183). It was used later, by J. Vuillemin in his thesis (Stanford, 1973).
- cam ranh bay — an inlet of the South China Sea, on the SE coast of Vietnam: U. S. military facility during the Vietnam War.
- camber piece — a centering for a flat arch, slightly crowned to allow for settling of the arch.
- camp bastion — a large British military base in Helmand province, Afghanistan, built in 2006
- camphor ball — mothball
- cancerphobia — an excessive fear of getting cancer
- cannabinoids — Plural form of cannabinoid.
- cannibalised — Simple past tense and past participle of cannibalise.
- cannibalized — Simple past tense and past participle of cannibalize.
- cannibalizes — Third-person singular simple present indicative form of cannibalize.
- cannonballed — Simple past tense and past participle of cannonball.
- cantabrigian — of, relating to, or characteristic of Cambridge or Cambridge University, or of Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Harvard University
- canterburies — Plural form of canterbury.
- capabilities — the quality of being capable; capacity; ability: His capability was unquestionable.
- cape buffalo — a large, black, nearly hairless, very fierce buffalo (Syncerus caffer) of South Africa, with horns joined at the bases to form a helmetlike structure