19-letter words containing l, o, b, i
- load-bearing printf — (programming, humour) The kind of bug present in a program which works correctly when producing debug output but fails when the debugging is turned off. The expression combines load-bearing wall and printf as used in debugging by printf.
- lobster-tail helmet — a burgonet fitted with a long, articulated tail of lames for protecting the nape of the neck, worn by cavalry in the 17th century.
- logical unit number — (storage) (LUN) A 3-bit identifier used on a SCSI bus to distinguish between up to eight devices (logical units) with the same SCSI ID.
- lord baltimore cake — a yellow layer cake, using only the yolks of eggs and having a fruit-nut filling consisting of pecans, almonds, maraschino cherries, and macaroon crumbs.
- louis ii de bourbon — Condé, Prince de.
- malleable cast iron — white cast iron that has been malleablized.
- mercurial barometer — mercury barometer.
- molecular biologist — a specialist in the study of biological phenomena at the molecular level
- molybdenum trioxide — a white, crystalline, sparingly water-soluble powder, MoO 3 , used chiefly in the manufacture of molybdenum compounds.
- monoclonal antibody — antibody produced by a laboratory-grown cell clone, either of a hybridoma or a virus-transformed lymphocyte, that is more abundant and uniform than natural antibody and is able to bind specifically to a single site on almost any chosen antigen or reveal previously unknown antigen sites: used as an analytic tool in scientific research and medical diagnosis and potentially important in the treatment of certain diseases. Abbreviation: MAb.
- mordvinian republic — a constituent republic of W central Russia, in the middle Volga basin. Capital: Saransk. Pop: 888 700 (2002). Area: 26 200 sq km (10 110 sq miles)
- municipal bond fund — a mutual fund that invests in municipal bonds.
- mutual masturbation — the act of two or more people masturbating each other
- national book award — any of several awards given annually, 1949–79, to an author whose book was judged the best in its category: administered by the Association of American Publishers. Abbreviation: NBA, N.B.A.
- national coal board — a statutory corporation set up to run Britain's nationalised coal mining industry between 1947 and 1994, at which time the industry was privatized
- negation by failure — An extralogical feature of Prolog and other logic programming languages in which failure of unification is treated as establishing the negation of a relation. For example, if Ronald Reagan is not in our database and we asked if he was an American, Prolog would answer "no".
- nominative absolute — a construction consisting in English of a noun, noun phrase, or pronoun in the nominative case followed by a predicate lacking a finite verb, used as a loose modifier of the whole sentence, as the play done in The play done, the audience left the theater.
- non-distinguishable — to mark off as different (often followed by from or by): He was distinguished from the other boys by his height.
- non-transferability — to convey or remove from one place, person, etc., to another: He transferred the package from one hand to the other.
- normal distribution — a theoretical frequency distribution represented by a normal curve.
- not by a long sight — on no account; not at all
- object-oriented sql — (language) (OSQL) A functional language, a superset of SQL, used in Hewlett-Packard's OpenODB database system.
- observation balloon — a balloon that is used for gathering information and reconnaissance purposes and spotting aircraft
- office-block ballot — a ballot on which the candidates are listed alphabetically, with or without their party designations, in columns under the office for which they were nominated.
- olive-backed thrush — Swainson's thrush.
- on the baker's list — in good health
- once in a blue moon — very rarely; almost never
- optical double star — two stars that appear as one if not viewed through a telescope with adequate magnification, such as two stars that are separated by a great distance but are nearly in line with each other and an observer (optical double star) or those that are relatively close together and comprise a single physical system (physical double star)
- palaeoethnobotanist — someone who studies fossil seeds and grains to further archaeological knowledge, esp of the domestication of cereals
- paradichlorobenzene — a white, crystalline, volatile, water-insoluble solid, C 6 H 4 Cl 2 , of the benzene series, having a penetrating odor: used chiefly as a moth repellent.
- perfoliate bellwort — a slender plant, Uvularia perfoliata, of the lily family, of eastern North America, having pale yellow, bell-shaped flowers.
- personal belongings — possessions; things that belong to someone
- phenylthiocarbamide — a crystalline, slightly water-soluble solid, C 6 H 5 NHCSNH 2 , that is either tasteless or bitter, depending upon the heredity of the taster, and is used in medical genetics and as a diagnostic.
- phthalocyanine blue — a pigment used in painting, derived from copper phthalocyanine and characterized chiefly by its brilliant, dark-blue color and by permanence.
- pointe-aux-trembles — a city in S Quebec, in E Canada, N of Montreal, on the St. Lawrence.
- polycarboxylic acid — a type of carboxylic acid containing two or more carboxyl groups
- polyclonal antibody — a mixture of antibodies of different specificities, as in the serum of a person immunized to various antigens.
- post office problem — (algorithm) Given a set of points (in N dimensions), find another point which minimises the sum of the distances from that point to each of the others.
- postal savings bank — any of the savings banks formerly operated by local post offices and limited to small accounts.
- potassium bisulfate — a colorless, crystalline, water-soluble solid, KHSO 4 , used chiefly in the conversion of tartrates to bitartrates.
- profitability study — a study of how much profit a company, organization, etc, makes or how profitable it is
- pseudo-biographical — of or relating to a person's life: He's gathering biographical data for his book on Milton.
- public-opinion poll — a poll taken by sampling a cross section of the public in an effort to predict election results or to estimate public attitudes on issues.
- rag-tag and bobtail — the riffraff; rabble: The ragtag and bobtail of every nation poured into the frontier in search of gold.
- relational database — an electronic database comprising multiple files of related information, usually stored in tables of rows (records) and columns (fields), and allowing a link to be established between separate files that have a matching field, as a column of invoice numbers, so that the two files can be queried simultaneously by the user.
- removable cartridge — a hard disk enclosed in a case that can be removed from the disk drive, having more storage than floppy disks.
- removable hard disk — (storage) A type of magnetic disk, or possibly magneto-optical disk which is not permanently attached to the disk drive (not a fixed disk) but which can be taken out and replaced, allowing many disks to be used in the same drive. The term "removable disk" would seem to be applicable to floppy disks but is generally reserved for hard disks in suitable cartridges such as those made by Syquest, Iomega and others. Removable disk packs were common on minicomputers such as the PDP-11 in use in the 1970s except that the drives were the size of washing machines and the disk packs as big as car wheels. Removable disks became popular on microcomputers in the 1990s as a cheap way of expanding disk space, transporting large amounts of data between computers and storing backups. Large, cheap fixed hard disks and USB memory sticks have made removable disks less attractive.
- republic of ireland — John, 1838–1918, U.S. Roman Catholic clergyman and social reformer, born in Ireland: archbishop of St. Paul, Minn., 1888–1918.
- republic of letters — the collective body of literary people.
- republic of vietnam — the name (from 1955–75) for South Vietnam, as an independent republic, following the division of the country in 1954 into North Vietnam and South Vietnam