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19-letter words containing d, r, a, i

  • at one's discretion — as one wishes
  • 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.
  • auricular appendage — auricle (def 1b).
  • auricular-appendage — Anatomy. the projecting outer portion of the ear; pinna. Also called auricular appendage. an ear-shaped appendage projecting from each atrium of the heart. (loosely) the atrium.
  • baader-meinhof gang — a group of left-wing West German terrorists, active in the 1970s, who were dedicated to the violent overthrow of capitalist society
  • bacillary dysentery — shigellosis.
  • backward compatible — backward compatibility
  • 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
  • ballistocardiograph — an instrument that records the slight recoil of the body, while on a special bed, caused by the contractions of the heart: used to measure cardiac pumping power and the elasticity of the aorta
  • bandar seri begawan — the capital of Brunei. Pop: 64 000 (2005 est)
  • barometric gradient — pressure gradient
  • batterie de cuisine — cooking utensils collectively; pots and pans, etc
  • 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.
  • behavioral medicine — an interdisciplinary field that uses the concepts and techniques of the behavioral sciences to improve physical and emotional health.
  • 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.
  • binding arbitration — dispute resolution
  • binocular disparity — the small differences in the positions of the parts of the images falling on each eye that results when each eye views the scene from a slightly different position; these differences make stereoscopic vision possible
  • 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.
  • blind carbon (copy) — a carbon copy of a letter sent to someone other than the addressee, with no indication on the original letter that such a copy has been sent
  • blood-brain barrier — the barrier created by the walls of the capillaries of the brain that prevents certain substances, as most proteins and drugs, from passing from the blood into the brain tissue and cerebrospinal fluid
  • 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.
  • boundary commission — (in Britain) a body established by statute to undertake periodic reviews of the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies and to recommend changes to take account of population shifts
  • brand contamination — the process by which the reputation of a particular brand or product becomes tarnished by adverse publicity
  • brush-tailed possum — any of several widely-distributed Australian possums of the genus Trichosurus
  • building contractor — an individual or company that contracts for the construction of houses, etc
  • buildings insurance — insurance which covers buildings
  • butabarbital sodium — a barbiturate, C 10 H 15 N 2 NaO 3 , used as a sedative and hypnotic.
  • 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
  • calcium oxychloride — a white powder that decomposes on contact with water and has the characteristic odor of gaseous chlorine: regarded, when dry, as a mixed calcium hypochlorite-chloride, used as a commercial bleach for wood pulp, textiles, oils, and soaps, and in laundering as a decolorizer and disinfectant.
  • capital expenditure — expenditure on acquisitions of or improvements to fixed assets
  • captain of industry — You can refer to the owners or senior managers of industrial companies as captains of industry.
  • carbon dioxide snow — solid carbon dioxide, used as a refrigerant
  • cardbox for windows — (database)   A database handling program, especially useful for scholars and librarians.
  • 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
  • cerebrospinal fluid — the clear colourless fluid in the spaces inside and around the spinal cord and brain
  • 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.
  • 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
  • chinese sacred lily — a Chinese amaryllidaceous plant, Narcissus tazetta orientalis, widely grown as a house plant for its fragrant yellow and white flowers
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