17-letter words containing d, r, e, a, i
- appointed actuary — An appointed actuary is an actuary appointed by a life insurance company, whose main role is to carry out a regular valuation of the reserves held to pay future policy benefits.
- archimedes' screw — an ancient type of water-lifting device making use of a spiral passage in an inclined cylinder. The water is raised when the spiral is rotated
- arranged marriage — In an arranged marriage, the parents choose the person who their son or daughter will marry.
- arsenic disulfide — an orange-red, water-insoluble, poisonous powder, As 4 S 4 , As 2 S 2 , or AsS, used chiefly in the manufacture of fireworks.
- articulated joint — Anatomy. a flexible joint.
- articulated lorry — a lorry made in two separate sections, a tractor and a trailer, connected by a pivoted bar
- artificial kidney — a mechanical apparatus for performing haemodialysis
- artistic director — a person in charge of the artistic direction of a theatre company
- ascertained goods — specific goods
- assembly district — one of a fixed number of districts into which a state is divided, each district electing one member to the lower house of the state legislature.
- assistant driller — An assistant driller is someone whose job is to help a driller, and work at the drilling controls on the rig floor.
- audience research — research into the make-up and habits of the audience of a particular television or radio programme or network
- audio description — a facility provided for visually impaired people in which a film, television programme, or play is described through audio technology
- augmented reality — an artificial environment created through the combination of real-world and computer-generated data
- aurea mediocritas — the golden mean.
- average deviation — a measure of dispersion, computed by taking the arithmetic mean of the absolute values of the deviations of the functional values from some central value, usually the mean or median.
- axis of ordinates — y-axis (def 1).
- axis-of-ordinates — y-axis (def 1).
- bacteriorhodopsin — a purple protein containing retinal and found in the plasma membrane of certain bacteria (genus Halobacterium): it directly supplies electrochemical energy from sunlight
- balanced literacy — a method of teaching reading in which phonics and whole language approaches are both used to maximize student learning.
- bar-tailed godwit — a large wader, Limosa lapponica, of the family Scolopacidae which, in migrating from Alaska to New Zealand, makes the longest journey without stopping for food taken by any animal
- barbed wire fence — a fence constructed from strong wire that has sharply pointed barbs at close intervals along its length
- barbed-wire grass — an aromatic grass, Cymbopogon refractus, with groups of seed heads resembling barbed wire
- bari delle puglie — Italian name of Bari.
- barmecide (feast) — a pretended feast with no food
- barrel distortion — distortion of an image produced by an optical system that causes straight lines at image margins to bulge outwards
- base lending rate — a minimum interest rate on which financial institutions base the rates they use for lending
- baseboard heating — a heating system by pipes, through which steam or hot water circulates, near the base of the walls of rooms
- be a box of birds — to be very well indeed
- be running scared — If you say that a person or group is running scared, you mean that they are frightened of what someone might do to them or what might happen.
- beardmore glacier — one of the largest glaciers, in central Antarctica. About 125 miles (200 km) long.
- beer and skittles — enjoyment or pleasure
- benoit mandelbrot — (person) /ben'wa man'dl-bro/ Benoit B. Mandelbrot. The IBM scientist who wrote several original books on fractals and gave his name to the set he was discovered, the Mandelbrot set and coined the term "fractal" in 1975 from the Latin fractus or "to break".
- bergisch gladbach — city in W Germany, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia: pop. 105,000
- bergisch-gladbach — an industrial city in W Germany, near Cologne.
- beyond comparison — outstanding, without equal
- bill of adventure — a certificate made out by a merchant to show that goods handled by him and his agents are the property of another party at whose risk the dealing is done
- bill of attainder — (formerly) a legislative act finding a person guilty without trial of treason or felony and declaring him attainted
- bitter almond oil — almond oil (def 2).
- bitter-almond-oil — Also called sweet almond oil, expressed almond oil. a colorless to pale yellow fatty oil expressed from the seeds of the sweet almond, used in preparing perfumes and confections.
- black-tailed deer — a variety of mule deer, Odocoileus hemionus columbianus, of the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, having a tail that is black above.
- blue-headed vireo — solitary vireo.
- board of estimate — a special organ of a municipal government, as of New York City, composed of the mayor, the president of the city council, and the controller, and charged with approving the city's budget and fiscal matters.
- board-and-shingle — a small dwelling with wooden walls and a shingle roof
- boat-billed heron — a nocturnal, tropical American wading bird (Cochlearius cochlearius) with a large, broad bill: it is the only member of a family (Cochleariidae) of wading birds
- boileau-despreaux — Nicolas [nee-kaw-lah] /ni kɔˈlɑ/ (Show IPA), 1636–1711, French critic and poet.
- bombardier beetle — any of various small carabid beetles of the genus Brachinus, esp B. crepitans of Europe, which defend themselves by ejecting a jet of volatile fluid
- book depreciation — Book depreciation is depreciation in a company's internal financial records that is different from the amount that is used for taxes.
- branch prediction — (processor, algorithm) A technique used in some processors with instruction prefetch to guess whether a conditional branch will be taken or not and prefetch code from the appropriate location. When a branch instruction is executed, its address and that of the next instruction executed (the chosen destination of the branch) are stored in the Branch Target Buffer. This information is used to predict which way the instruction will branch the next time it is executed so that instruction prefetch can continue. When the prediction is correct (and it is over 90% of the time), executing a branch does not cause a pipeline break. Some later CPUs simply prefetch both paths instead of trying to predict which way the branch will go. An extension of the idea of branch prediction is speculative execution.
- brazilian emerald — a green variety of tourmaline used as a gem: not a true emerald.