12-letter words containing i, s, t
- battlefields — Plural form of battlefield.
- beamsplitter — Alternative spelling of beam splitter.
- bear witness — to give written or oral testimony
- beautifulest — (dated) Most beautiful; more beautiful than anyone or anything else.
- beauty strip — a narrow forest corridor left uncut alongside a road or body of water.
- beggar-ticks — any of various plants, such as the bur marigold and tick trefoil, having fruits or seeds that cling to clothing, fur, etc
- beit knesset — a synagogue: often used in the names of congregations
- belligerents — warlike; given to waging war.
- below stairs — People sometimes use below stairs to refer to the servants in a rich household and the things that are connected with them.
- best in show — an award to the dog, cat, or other animal judged best of all breeds in a competition.
- best-selling — A best-selling product such as a book is very popular and a large quantity of it has been sold.
- beta orionis — Rigel
- beta testing — (programming) Evaluation of a pre-release (potentially unreliable) version of a piece of software (or possibly hardware) by making it available to selected users ("beta testers") before it goes on general distribution. Beta testign aims to discover bugs that only occur in certain environments or under certain patterns of use, while reducing the volume of feedback to a manageable level. The testers benefit by having earlier access to new products, features and fixes. Beta testing may be preceded by "alpha testing", performed in-house by a handful of users (e.g. other developers or friends), who can be expected to give rapid, high quality feedback on design and usability. Once the product is considered to be usable for its intended purpose it then moves on to "beta testing" by a larger, but typically still limited, number of ordinary users, who may include external customers. Some companies such as Google or Degree Jungle stretch the definition, claiming their products are "in beta" for many months by millions of users. The term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the industry. "Alpha test" was the unit test, module test or component test phase; "Beta Test" was initial system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that the engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production design.
- beta version — beta testing
- beth midrash — a place where Jews gather to study the Talmud and other religious writings; a small synagogue.
- beth shammai — the school of Jewish legal thought and hermeneutics founded in Jerusalem in the 1st century b.c. by the Jewish teacher Shammai and characterized by an austere or rigid interpretation of Jewish law and tradition.
- betting news — the news of the latest odds on winners of matches, races and competitions
- betting shop — A betting shop is a place where people can go to bet on something such as a horse race.
- betting slip — a piece of paper used to place a bet
- betweentimes — between other activities; during intervals
- bibliologist — a student of bibliology
- bibliopegist — a bookbinder
- bidialectism — proficient in or using two dialects of the same language.
- bien pensant — a right-thinking person
- bilateralism — the practice of being bilateral
- billingsgate — the largest fish market in London, on the N bank of the River Thames; moved to new site at Canary Wharf in 1982 and the former building converted into offices
- binding post — one of several metal pegs or rods, fitted into a loose-leaf binder, for holding sheets with prepunched holes.
- bindle stiff — a hobo.
- bio-security — the precautions taken to protect against the spread of lethal or harmful organisms and diseases
- bioacoustics — the study of animals' use of sound
- bioastronomy — the branch of biology which deals with the study or the discovery of life forms on other planets or in space
- biochemistry — Biochemistry is the study of the chemical processes that happen in living things.
- biodiversity — Biodiversity is the existence of a wide variety of plant and animal species living in their natural environment.
- biomagnetics — the study of magnetic fields as a form of therapy
- biomagnetism — animal magnetism.
- biopesticide — a naturally occurring or derived substance or an organism that controls pests by nontoxic means
- biorhythmics — the study of biorhythms
- biosatellite — an artificial satellite for carrying living organisms
- bioscientist — any science that deals with the biological aspects of living organisms.
- biosynthesis — the formation of complex compounds from simple substances by living organisms
- biosynthetic — of, relating to, or characterized by biosynthesis, the formation of chemical compounds by a living organism, or a laboratory process modeled after these reactions in living organisms.
- bioterrorism — Bioterrorism is terrorism that involves the use of biological weapons.
- bird nesting — the activity of searching for birds' nests as a hobby
- bird's mouth — a right-angled notch cut in the underside of a rafter for fitting over a longitudinal member, as a wall plate.
- bird-s--nest — nest (def 1).
- bird-spotter — a bird-watcher
- biscuit ware — unglazed earthenware
- bismuthinite — a grey mineral consisting of bismuth sulphide in orthorhombic crystalline form. It occurs in veins associated with tin, copper, silver, lead, etc, and is a source of bismuth. Formula: Bi2S3
- bit of skirt — a girl or woman
- bit stuffing — (protocol) A protocol which guarantees the receiver of synchronous data can recover the sender's clock. When the data stream sent contains a large number of adjacent bits which cause no transition of the signal, the receiver cannot adjust its clock to maintain proper synchronised reception. To eliminate the possibility of such a pathological case, when a preset number of transitionless bits have been transmitted, a bit which does cause a transition is "stuffed" (transmitted) by the sender. The receiver follows the same protocol and removes the stuffed bit after the specified number of transitionless bits, but can use the stuffed bit to recover the sender's clock. The advantage of bit stuffing is that only a bit (not a byte) is inserted in the data stream, and that only when the content of the data stream fails to provide a timing signal to the receiver. Thus very nearly 100% of the bits transported are useful data. In contrast, asynchronous transmission of data "throws away" a start bit and one or more stop bits for each data byte sent.