17-letter words containing i, r, t, a, o, n
- at swords' points — ready to quarrel or fight
- at their own game — If you beat someone at their own game, you use the same methods that they have used, but more successfully, so that you gain an advantage over them.
- attorneys-in-fact — a person authorized by power of attorney to act on the authorizer's behalf outside a court of law.
- attraction sphere — centrosphere (sense 1)
- audio description — a facility provided for visually impaired people in which a film, television programme, or play is described through audio technology
- australian ballot — an official ballot listing candidates for election to public office and issues, levies, etc., distributed inside the polling place to be marked by the voter in secret: it originated in Australia and is widely used in the U.S.
- australopithecine — any of various extinct apelike primates of the genus Australopithecus and related genera, remains of which have been discovered in southern and E Africa. Some species are estimated to be over 4.5 million years old
- authoritativeness — having due authority; having the sanction or weight of authority: an authoritative opinion.
- authority control — the establishment and maintainance of consistent forms of terms, as of names, subjects, and titles, to be used as headings in bibliographic records.
- autocorrelational — Of or pertaining to autocorrelation.
- automatic writing — writing performed without apparent intent or conscious control, especially to achieve spontaneity or uncensored expression.
- 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.
- aviation industry — a collective term for the companies involved in air transport
- axis of ordinates — y-axis (def 1).
- axis-of-ordinates — y-axis (def 1).
- back on the rails — If something is back on the rails, it is beginning to be successful again after a period when it almost failed.
- bacteriorhodopsin — a purple protein containing retinal and found in the plasma membrane of certain bacteria (genus Halobacterium): it directly supplies electrochemical energy from sunlight
- barrel distortion — distortion of an image produced by an optical system that causes straight lines at image margins to bulge outwards
- bartholin's gland — either of two small glands near the vaginal opening: during sexual excitement they secrete a mucous lubricating substance
- baseboard heating — a heating system by pipes, through which steam or hot water circulates, near the base of the walls of rooms
- basic proposition — protocol (def 6).
- bathroom fittings — plumbing fixtures or accessories suitable for use in a bathroom
- battle of britain — (in World War II) the series of aerial combats that took place between British and German aircraft during the autumn of 1940 and that included the severe bombardment of British cities.
- beat one's brains — to try hard to remember, understand, or solve something
- 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".
- bighorn mountains — range of the Rocky Mountains in N Wyo. and S Mont.: highest peak, 13,165 ft (4,013 m)
- 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
- binary opposition — a relation between the members of a pair of linguistic items, as a pair of distinctive features, such that one is the absence of the other, as voicelessness and voice, or that one is at the opposite pole from the other, as stridency and mellowness.
- biological parent — a parent who has conceived (biological mother) or sired (biological father) rather than adopted a child and whose genes are therefore transmitted to the child.
- biotransformation — the metabolizing of some substance, esp. a drug, in the body
- birth of a nation — an American film (1915), directed by D. W. Griffith.
- 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.
- blackout curtains — thick, lined curtains designed to shut out all daylight and keep a room in complete darkness
- blood transfusion — A blood transfusion is a process in which blood is injected into the body of a person who is badly injured or ill.
- 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
- boatswain's chair — a seat consisting of a short flat board slung from ropes, used to support a person working on the side of a vessel or in its rigging
- bohemian brethren — a Protestant Christian sect formed in the 15th century from various Hussite groups, which rejected oaths and military service and advocated a pure and disciplined spiritual life. It was reorganized in 1722 as the Moravian Church
- book depreciation — Book depreciation is depreciation in a company's internal financial records that is different from the amount that is used for taxes.
- boolean operation — any operation in which each of the operands and the result take one of two values.
- 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 peridot — a light yellowish-green tourmaline used as a gem: not a true peridot.
- breathe life into — revive, rejuvenate
- bricks and mortar — You can use bricks and mortar to refer to houses and other buildings, especially when they are considered as an investment.
- brighton and hove — a city and unitary authority in S England, in East Sussex. Pop: 251 500 (2003 est). Area: 72 sq km (28 sq miles)
- british cameroons — a former British trust territory of West Africa
- british columbian — of or relating to British Columbia or its inhabitants
- british-cameroons — German Kamerun. a region in W Africa: a German protectorate 1884–1919; divided in 1919 into British and French mandates.
- brompton cocktail — an analgesic mixture, usually containing morphine and cocaine and sometimes other narcotic substances in an alcohol solution, administered primarily to advanced cancer patients.