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16-letter words containing e, s, o, p

  • be in one's cups — If someone is in their cups, they are drunk.
  • belgian sheepdog — any of a Belgian breed of large herding dog with a black coat, sometimes used as a guide dog
  • beside the point — If you say that something is beside the point, you mean that it is not relevant to the subject that you are discussing.
  • bessemer process — (formerly) a process for producing steel by blowing air through molten pig iron at about 1250°C in a Bessemer converter: silicon, manganese, and phosphorus impurities are removed and the carbon content is controlled
  • big bag of pages — (BIBOP) Where data objects are tagged with some kind of descriptor (giving their size or type for example) memory can be saved by storing objects with the same descriptor in one "page" of memory. The most significant bits of an object's address are used as the BIBOP page number. This is looked up in a BIBOP table to find the descriptor for all objects in that page. This idea is similar to the "zones" used in some Lisp systems (e.g. LeLisp).
  • bipolar disorder — Bipolar disorder is a mental illness in which a person's state of mind changes between extreme happiness and extreme depression.
  • bird of paradise — A bird of paradise is a songbird which is found mainly in New Guinea. The male birds have very brightly coloured feathers.
  • bird-of-paradise — Also called bird-of-paradise flower. any of several plants of the genus Strelitzia, native to southern Africa, especially S. reginae, having a large, showy orange and blue inflorescence.
  • bird's-nest soup — a rich spicy Chinese soup made from the outer part of the nests of SE Asian swifts of the genus Collocalia
  • boatswain's pipe — a whistle used formerly to give orders on board ship
  • bootstrap loader — (operating system)   A short program loaded from non-volatile storage and used to bootstrap a computer. On early computers great efforts were expended on making the bootstrap loader short, in order to make it easy to toggle in via the front panel switches. It was just clever enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from punched cards or paper tape), to which it handed control. This program in turn read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer "pulled itself up by its bootstraps" to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap loader is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the "boot block". When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it. A diskless workstation can use bootp to load its OS from the network.
  • bootstrap memory — memory that allows new programs to be entered because some simple preliminary instructions or information are already built in.
  • boston cream pie — a cake of two layers with icing and a creamy filling
  • boston tea party — a raid in 1773 made by citizens of Boston (disguised as Indians) on three British ships in the harbour as a protest against taxes on tea and the monopoly given to the East India Company. The contents of several hundred chests of tea were dumped into the harbour
  • boundary dispute — dispute between neighbours about the boundary between their properties
  • bouquet larkspur — a plant, Delphinium grandiflorum, of eastern Asia, having blue or whitish flowers and hairy fruit.
  • bowman's capsule — a membranous, double-walled capsule surrounding a glomerulus of a nephron.
  • brake horsepower — the rate at which an engine does work, expressed in horsepower. It is measured by the resistance of an applied brake
  • branchiopneustic — breathing by means of gills, as certain aquatic insect larvae.
  • bristlecone pine — a coniferous tree, Pinus aristata, of the western US, bearing cones with bristle-like prickles: one of the longest-lived trees, useful in radiocarbon dating
  • brothel-creepers — soft-soled men's shoes that were originally popular in the 1950s
  • bulletproof vest — a protective garment
  • bust one's chops — Usually, chops. the jaw.
  • button one's lip — to stop talking: often imperative
  • bypass operation — an operation involving redirection of blood flow, either to avoid a diseased blood vessel or in order to perform heart surgery
  • camomile shampoo — a liquid or cream preparation of soap or detergent with camomile extract to wash the hair
  • capsizing moment — the moment of an upsetting couple.
  • capsule wardrobe — a collection of clothes and accessories that includes only items considered essential
  • carbonless paper — a sheet of paper impregnated with dye which transfers writing or typing onto the copying surface below without the necessity for carbon pigment
  • carboxypeptidase — any of several digestive enzymes that catalyze the removal of an amino acid from the end of a peptide chain having a free carbonyl group.
  • career prospects — the probability or chance for future success in a profession
  • caryophyllaceous — of, relating to, or belonging to the Caryophyllaceae, a family of flowering plants including the pink, carnation, sweet william, and chickweed
  • chattel personal — an item of movable personal property, such as furniture, domestic animals, etc
  • checking deposit — a deposit on which cheques may be drawn
  • chemical weapons — toxic chemicals used as weapons
  • chemolithotrophs — Plural form of chemolithotroph.
  • chemoprophylaxis — the prevention of disease using chemical drugs
  • chinese pavilion — crescent (def 6).
  • chinese primrose — any plant of the genus Primula, as P. vulgaris (English primrose) of Europe, having yellow flowers, or P. sinensis (Chinese primrose) of China, having flowers in a variety of colors. Compare primrose family.
  • chinese-pavilion — a shape resembling a segment of a ring tapering to points at the ends.
  • chipped potatoes — chips
  • cholecystography — radiography of the gall bladder after administration of a contrast medium
  • chopped tomatoes — tomatoes cut into pieces
  • chromatographies — Plural form of chromatography.
  • chymotrypsinogen — the inactive precursor of chymotrypsin
  • circumsporozoite — (biology, of a protein) Located on the surface of a sporozoite (and involved in host cell recognition and invasion); abbreviated as CS.
  • closed-captioned — (of a video recording) having subtitles which appear on screen only if the cassette is played through a special decoder
  • commissionership — The role or office of commissioner.
  • company of jesus — former name of the Society of Jesus.
  • compartmentalise — to divide into categories or compartments.
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