16-letter words containing i, s, t, a
- be of assistance — Someone or something that is of assistance to you is helpful or useful to you.
- bearing pedestal — an independent support for a bearing, usually incorporating a bearing housing
- bearish tendency — a tendency for share prices to fall
- beauty therapist — a person whose job is to carry out treatments to improve a person's appearance, such as facials, manicures, removal of unwanted hair, etc
- belted-bias tire — a motor-vehicle tire of the same construction as a bias-ply tire but with an added belt of steel or a strong synthetic material under the tread.
- benoit samuelson — Joan (Joan Benoit) born 1957, U.S. distance runner: first Olympic marathon women's winner, 1984.
- beta abstraction — [lambda-calculus] The conversion of an expression to an application of a lambda abstraction to an argument expression. Some subterm of the original expression becomes the argument of the abstraction and the rest becomes its body. E.g. 4+1 --> (\ x . x+1) 4 The opposite of beta abstraction is beta reduction. These are the two kinds of beta conversion.
- bias-belted tire — belted-bias tire.
- bicapitalisation — The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as PostScript, NeXT, NeWS, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalisation. Too many marketroid types think this sort of thing is really cute, even the 2,317th time they do it. Compare studlycaps.
- bimetallic strip — a strip consisting of two metals of different coefficients of expansion welded together so that it buckles on heating: used in thermostats, etc
- birthday honours — (in Britain) honorary titles conferred on the official birthday of the sovereign
- birthday present — a gift given to someone on their birthday
- bite one's nails — to chew off the ends of one's fingernails
- black nightshade — a poisonous solanaceous plant, Solanum nigrum, a common weed in cultivated land, having small white flowers with backward-curved petals and black berry-like fruits
- blasting gelatin — a type of plastic dynamite containing about 7 percent of a cellulose nitrate, used chiefly in underwater work.
- boatswain's mate — a job classification in the US navy
- boatswain's pipe — a whistle used formerly to give orders on board ship
- bonneville flats — an area of salt flats in the W part of Great Salt Lake Desert, in NW Utah: site of automobile speed tests.
- boston cream pie — a cake of two layers with icing and a creamy filling
- boundary dispute — dispute between neighbours about the boundary between their properties
- bragg scattering — the diffraction phenomenon exhibited by a crystal bombarded with x-rays in such a way that each plane of the crystal lattice acts as a reflector (Bragg reflector)
- braking distance — the distance a vehicle travels from the point at which its brakes are applied to the point at which it comes to a stop
- branchiopneustic — breathing by means of gills, as certain aquatic insect larvae.
- brass instrument — a musical wind instrument of brass or other metal with a cup-shaped mouthpiece, as the trombone, tuba, French horn, trumpet, or cornet.
- brave west winds — the strong west and west-northwest winds blowing between latitudes 40° S and 60° S.
- breast screening — a radiological or other examination of a woman's breasts to check for signs of cancer
- bright's disease — chronic inflammation of the kidneys; chronic nephritis
- british columbia — a province of W Canada, on the Pacific coast: largely mountainous with extensive forests, rich mineral resources, and important fisheries. Capital: Victoria. Pop: 4 400 057 (2011 est). Area: 930 532 sq km (359 279 sq miles)
- british honduras — Belize
- british longhair — a breed of large cat with a semi-long thick soft coat
- brittany spaniel — a short-tailed French bird dog that typically has a smooth orange- or liver-and-white coat
- brittle diabetes — uncontrolled insulin disorder
- bronchial asthma — asthma.
- brood parasitism — a type of parasitism in which a bird (brood parasite), as a cowbird or European cuckoo, lays and abandons its eggs in the nest of another species
- bullet-resistant — not allowing bullets to pass through
- bullying tactics — the use of intimidation to gain one's objective
- burnet saxifrage — a Eurasian umbelliferous plant of the genus Pimpinella, having umbrella-like clusters of white or pink flowers
- business account — a bank account or type of bank account used for business transactions rather than personal ones
- business analyst — (job) A person who analyses the operations of a department or functional unit to develop a general systems solution to the problem. The solution will typically involve a combination of manual and automated processes. The business analyst can provide insights into an operation for an information systems analyst.
- bypass capacitor — a capacitor which provides a low-impedance path for alternating current while not passing any direct current
- bypass operation — an operation involving redirection of blood flow, either to avoid a diseased blood vessel or in order to perform heart surgery
- cabinet minister — a minister who is a member of the cabinet
- cable television — Cable television is a television system in which signals are sent along wires rather than by radio waves.
- cache on a stick — (architecture) (COAST) Intel Corporation attempt to's standardise the modular L2 cache subsystem in Pentium-based computers. A COAST module should be about 4.35" wide by 1.14" high. According to earlier specifications from Motorola, a module between 4.33" and 4.36" wide, and between 1.12" and 1.16" high is within the COAST standard. Some module vendors, including some major motherboard suppliers, greatly violate the height specification. Another COAST specification violated by many suppliers concerns clock distribution in synchronous modules. The specification requires that the clock tree to each synchronous chip be balanced, i.e. equal length from edge of the connector to individual chips. An unbalanced clock tree increases reflections and noise. For a 256 kilobyte cache module the standard requires the same clock be used for both chips but some vendors use separate clocks to reduce loading on the clock driver and hence increase the clock speed. However, this creates unbalanced loading in other motherboard configurations, such as motherboards with soldered caches in the system.
- calcium arsenate — a toxic, white powder, Ca3(AsO4)2, used as an insecticide in the form of a spray or dust
- calcium silicate — any of the silicates of calcium: calcium metasilicate, dicalcium silicate, and tricalcium silicate.
- calculate a risk — If you calculate a risk, you decide how likely an event is, whether the insurer should underwrite the risk, and at what cost.
- call in question — a sentence in an interrogative form, addressed to someone in order to get information in reply.
- canaries current — an ocean current of the North Atlantic flowing southward past Spain and North Africa.
- canine distemper — distemper1 (def 1a).