14-letter words containing d, i, a, s
- barium sulfide — a gray or yellowish-green, water-soluble, poisonous powder, BaS, used chiefly as a depilatory and as an intermediate in the synthesis of pigments, especially lithopone.
- barrier island — a long island, parallel to the coastline, formed from a ridge of sand (barrier beach) thrown up by the waves, that serves the shore as a protective barrier against tidal waves, storms, etc.
- bascule bridge — a kind of drawbridge counterweighted so that it can be raised and lowered easily
- bascule-bridge — a device operating like a balance or seesaw, especially an arrangement of a movable bridge (bascule bridge) by which the rising floor or section is counterbalanced by a weight.
- basic industry — an industry which is highly important in a nation's economy
- basidiomycetes — Mycology. any of a group of fungi constituting the phylum Basidiomycota of the kingdom Fungi (or, in older classification schemes, the class Basidiomycetes of the kingdom Plantae), characterized by bearing the spores on a basidium, including the smuts, rust, mushrooms, and puffballs.
- bastard indigo — a bushy shrub, Amorpha fruticosa, of the legume family, native to North America, having elongated clusters of dull purplish or bluish flowers.
- bastard ridley — ridley (def 1).
- bastard-ridley — ridley (def 1).
- bastardisation — Alternative form of bastardization.
- bastardization — the act of bastardizing
- basting thread — inexpensive, loosely twisted thread that can be easily pulled out when permanent stitching is in place
- batten disease — a rare hereditary disease in which lipids accumulate in the nervous system, leading to mental deterioration, loss of mobility, and blindness that start in early childhood
- beard-stroking — deep thought
- bedside manner — A doctor's bedside manner is the way in which they talk to their patients.
- berberidaceous — of, relating to, or belonging to the Berberidaceae, a mainly N temperate family of flowering plants (mostly shrubs), including barberry and barrenwort
- berkner island — an island in Antarctica, in the S Weddell Sea, between the Ronne Ice Shelf and the Filchner Ice Shelf.
- bicuspid valve — mitral valve
- bidialectalism — the state of being bidialectal
- bildungsromane — a type of novel concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young protagonist.
- binding strake — a very strong, heavy strake of planking, especially one next to a sheer strake.
- bird sanctuary — an area of land in which birds are protected and encouraged to breed
- birds and bees — any warm-blooded vertebrate of the class Aves, having a body covered with feathers, forelimbs modified into wings, scaly legs, a beak, and no teeth, and bearing young in a hard-shelled egg.
- bitmap display — (hardware) A computer output device where each pixel displayed on the monitor screen corresponds directly to one or more bits in the computer's video memory. Such a display can be updated extremely rapidly since changing a pixel involves only a single processor write to memory compared with a terminal or VDU connected via a serial line where the speed of the serial line limits the speed at which the display can be changed. Most modern personal computers and workstations have bitmap displays, allowing the efficient use of graphical user interfaces, interactive graphics and a choice of on-screen fonts. Some more expensive systems still delegate graphics operations to dedicated hardware such as graphics accelerators. The bitmap display might be traced back to the earliest days of computing when the Manchester University Mark I(?) computer, developed by F.C. Williams and T. Kilburn shortly after the Second World War. This used a storage tube as its working memory. Phosphor dots were used to store single bits of data which could be read by the user and interpreted as binary numbers.
- black diamonds — carbonado1 .
- blade-shearing — the shearing of sheep using hand shears
- blind as a bat — having extremely poor eyesight
- blind staggers — the staggers
- blind stamping — an impression on a book cover without using colour or gold leaf
- blister-packed — presented in a blister pack
- boarding house — A boarding house is a house which people pay to stay in for a short time.
- boatswain bird — tropic bird.
- bobo-dioulasso — a city in W Burkina Faso. Pop: 396 000 (2005 est)
- body mechanics — body exercises that are intended to improve one's posture, stamina, poise, etc.
- body snatching — the act or practice of robbing a grave to obtain a cadaver for dissection.
- border disease — a congenital infectious disease of sheep and goats caused by a Togavirus and characterized by abortion, infertility, and deformity of lambs
- braddock hills — a town in SE Pennsylvania.
- brandy snifter — snifter (def 1).
- brazing solder — an alloy of copper and zinc for joining two metal surfaces by melting the alloy so that it forms a thin layer between the surfaces
- breast-feeding — to nurse (a baby) at the breast; suckle.
- bridge passage — bridge1 (def 7).
- british dollar — any of several coins formerly issued by the British Empire for use in certain territories, as the Straits dollar or the Hong Kong dollar.
- brood parasite — a young bird hatched and reared by birds of a different species as a result of brood parasitism.
- cahokia mounds — the largest group of prehistoric Indian earthworks in the US, located northeast of East St Louis
- caicos islands — a group of islands in the Caribbean: part of the British dependency of the Turks and Caicos Islands
- caller display — a facility which shows the number of an incoming call
- cambridge lisp — A flavour of Lisp using BCPL. Sources owned by Fitznorman partners.
- cambridgeshire — a county of E England, in East Anglia: includes the former counties of the Isle of Ely and Huntingdon and lies largely in the Fens: Peterborough became an independent unitary authority in 1998. Administrative centre: Cambridge. Pop (excluding Peterborough): 571 000 (2003 est). Area (excluding Peterborough): 3068 sq km (184 sq miles)
- camelopardalis — a N constellation between Ursa Major and Cassiopeia; the Giraffe
- canada thistle — a prickly European weed (Cirsium arvense) of the composite family, with heads of purplish flowers and wavy leaves: now common as a fast-spreading, injurious weed throughout the N U.S.