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19-letter words containing d, a, t, e

  • as old as the hills — very old
  • asbestos cork award — (humour)   Once, long ago at MIT, there was a flamer so consistently obnoxious that another hacker designed, had made, and distributed posters announcing that said flamer had been nominated for the "asbestos cork award". (Any reader in doubt as to the intended application of the cork should consult the etymology under flame.) Since then, it is agreed that only a select few have risen to the heights of bombast required to earn this dubious dignity - but there is no agreement on *which* few.
  • assault and battery — Assault and battery is the crime of attacking someone and causing them physical harm.
  • at one's discretion — as one wishes
  • at sixes and sevens — If you say that someone or something is at sixes and sevens, you mean that they are confused or disorganized.
  • attachment disorder — an emotional and behavioral disorder arising from a failure to form a strong bond with one’s primary caregiver in early childhood and affecting one’s social relationships in later childhood and adulthood. See also attachment (def 3a).
  • attendance register — an official list of people who are present at an institution such as a school
  • audio response unit — a device that enables a computer to give a spoken response by generating sounds similar to human speech.
  • augmented cognition — the study of the augmenting of human mental functions by computer programs
  • bacillary dysentery — shigellosis.
  • backward compatible — backward compatibility
  • backward somersault — a somersault performed in a backward direction with the legs leading the rest of the body
  • balfour declaration — the statement made by Arthur Balfour in 1917 of British support for the setting up of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, provided that the rights of "existing non-Jewish communities" in Palestine could be safeguarded
  • barometric gradient — pressure gradient
  • batterie de cuisine — cooking utensils collectively; pots and pans, etc
  • battle-ground state — a state of the U.S. in which the Democratic and Republican candidates both have a good chance of winning and that is considered key to the outcome of a presidential election: the swing states of Ohio and Indiana.
  • baudotbetical order — (algorithm)   /baw do bet' i k*l/ Sorted into an order where numerics and special characters are intermixed by sorting a 5-bit Baudot code file ignoring the numeric shift and unshift codes.
  • be liable to do sth — When something is liable to happen, it is very likely to happen.
  • benzylidene acetone — a colorless, crystalline, water-insoluble solid, C 10 H 10 O, having a vanillalike odor, used chiefly as a scent in the manufacture of perfume.
  • betwixt and between — in an intermediate, indecisive, or middle position
  • bicarbonate of soda — Bicarbonate of soda is a white powder which is used in baking to make cakes rise, and also as a medicine for your stomach.
  • bilingual education — schooling in which those not fluent in the standard or national language are taught in their own language.
  • bit-paired keyboard — (hardware)   (Obsolete, or "bit-shift keyboard") A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed. In order to avoid making the thing more of a Rube Goldberg kluge than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the same basic bit pattern on one key. Looking at the ASCII chart, we find: high low bits bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 010 ! " # $ % & ' ( ) 011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). This was *not* the weirdest variant of the QWERTY layout widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029 card punches. When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, there was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product look like an office typewriter. These alternatives became known as "bit-paired" and "typewriter-paired" keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical - and because most hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was little pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter standard. The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The "typewriter-paired" standard became universal, "bit-paired" hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse.
  • black-footed ferret — a musteline mammal, Mustela nigripes, of W North America, closely related to the weasels
  • black-tailed godwit — a large wading bird with a very long beak, Limosa limosa, found in W and Central Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia
  • blue-breasted quail — a small, brightly colored quail, Coturnix chinensis, of southern Asia and Australia, widely kept as a cage bird.
  • blue-tongued lizard — a large Australian lizard, Tiliqua scincoides, characterized by having a cobalt-blue tongue.
  • board certification — the process of certifying that a physician has passed an examination and met the standards of a professional organization representing a particular medical specialty.
  • board of trade unit — a unit of electrical energy equal to 1 kilowatt-hour
  • boat-tailed grackle — a large grackle, Quiscalus major, of the southeastern U.S., that folds its tail into a shape resembling the keel of a boat.
  • brush-tailed possum — any of several widely-distributed Australian possums of the genus Trichosurus
  • bulbourethral gland — Cowper's gland
  • cable-stayed bridge — a type of suspension bridge in which the supporting cables are connected directly to the bridge deck without the use of suspenders
  • cannot very well do — If you say that you cannot very well do something, you mean that it would not be right or possible to do it.
  • capacity attendance — a situation when a venue for an event is as full as it can be
  • cape-disappointment — Cape, a cape in SW Washington state, projecting into the Pacific Ocean on the N of the mouth of the Columbia River.
  • capital expenditure — expenditure on acquisitions of or improvements to fixed assets
  • castelnuovo-tedesco — Mario [mah-ryaw] /ˈmɑ ryɔ/ (Show IPA), 1895–1968, U.S. composer, born in Italy.
  • cat scratch disease — a disorder characterized by fever and swelling of the lymph glands, caused by a viral infection resulting from the scratch or bite of a cat.
  • cat-scratch disease — an ailment characterized by fever and swollen glands and believed to be caused by bacteria transmitted by the scratch or bite of a cat
  • cathodic protection — a technique for protecting metal structures, such as steel ships and pipelines, from electrolytic corrosion by making the structure the cathode in a cell, either by applying an electromotive force directly or by putting it into contact with a more electropositive metal
  • cathodoluminescence — luminescence caused by irradiation with electrons (cathode rays)
  • celestial longitude — the angular distance measured eastwards from the vernal equinox to the intersection of the ecliptic with the great circle passing through a celestial body and the poles of the ecliptic
  • chamber of deputies — the lower house of the legislature of certain countries, as Italy.
  • chandrasekhar limit — the upper limit to the mass of a white dwarf, equal to 1.44 solar masses. A star having a mass above this limit will continue to collapse to form a neutron star
  • chartered librarian — (in Britain) a librarian who has obtained a qualification from the Library Association in addition to a degree or diploma in librarianship
  • chassis dynamometer — A chassis dynamometer is a piece of test equipment fitted with rollers for the wheels of a vehicle, that is capable of providing drive input and measuring output such as power and torque at the wheels.
  • chateauneuf-du-pape — a dry red or white wine from the Rhone valley near Avignon.
  • cherenkov radiation — the electromagnetic radiation produced when a charged particle moves through a medium at a greater velocity than the velocity of light in that medium
  • chicken-fried steak — a cheap cut of beefsteak that is fried in batter
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