18-letter words containing h, o, r, n
- birth control pill — an oral contraceptive for women, containing the hormones estrogen and progesterone or progesterone alone, that inhibits ovulation, fertilization, or implantation of a fertilized ovum, causing temporary infertility.
- birth-control pill — an oral contraceptive for women, containing the hormones estrogen and progesterone or progesterone alone, that inhibits ovulation, fertilization, or implantation of a fertilized ovum, causing temporary infertility.
- borax pentahydrate — a white, crystalline, water-soluble solid, Na 2 B 4 O 7 ⋅5H 2 O, used chiefly for killing weeds, as a water softener, and as a disinfectant and deodorizing agent.
- bore the pants off — to bore extremely
- born to the purple — being of royal or high birth
- bosnia-herzegovina — a country in SE Europe; a constituent republic of Yugoslavia until 1991; in a state of civil war (1992–95); Serbian and Croatian forces were also involved: mostly barren and mountainous, with forests in the east. Languages: Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian (formerly all regarded together as Serbo-Croat). Religion: Muslim, Serbian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic. Currency: marka (pegged to the euro). Capital: Sarajevo. Pop: 3 875 723 (2013 est). Area: 51 129 sq km (19 737 sq miles)
- branch instruction — a machine-language or assembly-language instruction that causes the computer to branch to another instruction
- branch to fishkill — (IBM: from the location of one of the corporation's facilities) Any unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. See jump off into never-never land, hyperspace.
- branching fraction — (in branching) the proportion of the disintegrating nuclei that follow a particular branch to the total number of disintegrating nuclides
- breach of contract — the act of breaking the conditions of a contract
- breathe one's last — When someone breathes their last, they die.
- brightness control — a control that enables the brightness of the image on a television screen, computer monitor, etc to be adjusted
- british somaliland — a former British protectorate (1884–1960) in E Africa, on the Gulf of Aden: united with Italian Somaliland in 1960 to form Somalia (or the Somali Republic); in 1991 the self-styled republic of Somaliland, covering the same area as the former British Somaliland, declared itself independent and continues to function largely as a separate entity, though without international recognition
- broadcasting house — any of a number of buildings in the UK from which the BBC broadcasts or has broadcast
- bromochloromethane — chlorobromomethane.
- bronchocandidiasis — See under candidiasis.
- bullnose stretcher — bull stretcher (def 1).
- bullnose-stretcher — Also called bullnose stretcher. a brick having one of the edges along its length rounded for laying as a stretcher in a sill or the like.
- california fuchsia — a North American onagraceous plant, Zauschneria californica, with tubular scarlet flowers
- california-fuchsia — a plant belonging to the genus Fuchsia, of the evening primrose family, including many varieties cultivated for their handsome drooping flowers.
- carbonic anhydrase — an enzyme in blood cells that catalyses the decomposition of carbonic acid into carbon dioxide and water, facilitating the transport of carbon dioxide from the tissues to the lungs
- carbonic-anhydride — carbon dioxide.
- carboxyhaemoglobin — haemoglobin coordinated with carbon monoxide, formed as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. As carbon monoxide is bound in preference to oxygen, tissues are deprived of oxygen
- carolina chickadee — a chickadee, Parus carolinensis, of the southeastern U.S., resembling but smaller than the black-capped chickadee.
- carpenterworm moth — any moth of the family Cossidae, as Prionoxystus robiniae of the U.S. and southern Canada, whose larvae bore into the trunks and branches of oaks, locusts, and other trees.
- cartilaginous fish — any fish of the class Chondrichthyes, including the sharks, skates, and rays, having a skeleton composed entirely of cartilage
- cash-for-questions — of, involved in, or relating to a scandal in which some MPs were accused of accepting bribes to ask particular questions in Parliament
- catch one's breath — When you catch your breath while you are doing something energetic, you stop for a short time so that you can start breathing normally again.
- catherine of siena — Saint. 1347–80, Italian mystic and ascetic; patron saint of the Dominican order. Feast day: April 29
- cellular telephone — a mobile phone
- centralized school — a public school formed from the pupils and teachers of a number of discontinued smaller schools, especially in a rural district.
- character encoding — (character) (Or "character encoding scheme") A mapping between binary data values and character code positions (or "code points"). Early systems stored characters in a variety of ways, e.g. four six-bit characters in a 24-bit word, but around 1960, eight-bit bytes started to become the most common data storage layout, with each character stored in one byte, typically in the ASCII character set. In the case of ASCII, the character encoding is an identity mapping: code position 65 maps to the byte value 65. This is possible because ASCII uses only code positions representable as single bytes, i.e., values between 0 and 255. (US-ASCII only uses values 0 to 127, in fact.) From the late 1990s, there was increased use of larger character sets such as Unicode and many CJK coded character sets. These can represent characters from many languages and more symbols.
- charge conjugation — the mathematical operation of replacing every elementary particle by its antiparticle. Symbol: C.
- check verification — Check verification is a system that checks national databases of information about individuals to make sure that checks will be honored and fraud is not being committed.
- checkpoint charlie — a crossing between East and West Berlin during the Cold War
- chew someone's ear — to reprimand severely
- children of israel — the Jews; Hebrews
- chinese gooseberry — kiwi (sense 2)
- chinese revolution — the overthrow of the last Manchu emperor and the establishment of a republic in China (1911–12)
- chinese watermelon — a tropical Asian vine, Benincasa hispida, of the gourd family, having a brown, hairy stem, large, solitary, yellow flowers, and white, melonlike fruit.
- chloroacetophenone — a white, crystalline, water-insoluble, poisonous solid, C 8 H 7 ClO, used in solution as a tear gas. Abbreviation: CN.
- chlorobromomethane — a clear, colorless, volatile, nonflammable liquid, CH 2 ClBr, used chiefly as an extinguishing agent in fire extinguishers and as a solvent in organic synthesis.
- chlorofluorocarbon — Chlorofluorocarbons are the same as CFCs.
- chlorohydroquinone — a white to light-tan, crystalline, water-soluble solid, C 6 H 3 Cl(OH) 2 , used chiefly in organic synthesis and as a developer in photography.
- cholangiocarcinoma — (pathology) Cancer of the bile duct.
- chrétien de troyes — 12th century, French poet, who wrote the five Arthurian romances Erec; Cligès; Lancelot, le chevalier de la charette; Yvain, le chevalier au lion; and Perceval, le conte del Graal (?1155–?1190), the first courtly romances
- christian brothers — a religious congregation of laymen founded in France in 1684 for the education of the poor
- christian democrat — a member or supporter of a Christian Democratic party
- christian endeavor — an organization of young people of various evangelical Protestant churches, formed in 1881 to promote Christian principles and service.
- christian reformed — of or relating to a Protestant denomination (Christian Reformed Church) organized in the U.S. in 1857 by groups that had seceded from the Dutch Reformed Church.