18-letter words containing n, b, e
- fire-and-brimstone — threatening punishment in the hereafter: a fire-and-brimstone sermon.
- flash butt welding — a method of welding metal edge-to-edge with a powerful electric flash followed by the application of pressure.
- flat on one's back — lying supine
- for the time being — the system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future; indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another.
- forget-me-not blue — a shade of blue similar to the shade of the flowers of a forget-me-not
- fragmentation bomb — a bomb designed to break into many small, high-velocity fragments when detonated.
- gabriele dannunzio — Gabriele [Italian gah-bree-e-le] /Italian ˌgɑ briˈɛ lɛ/ (Show IPA), (Duca Minimo) 1863–1938, Italian soldier, novelist, and poet.
- gamal abdel nasser — Gamal Abdel [guh-mahl ab-doo l,, juh-] /gəˈmɑl ˈæb dʊl,, dʒə-/ (Show IPA), 1918–70, Egyptian military and political leader: prime minister of Egypt 1954–56; president of Egypt 1956–58; president of the United Arab Republic 1958–70.
- gamblers anonymous — an organization that holds group meetings to help people who are addicted to gambling
- garbage collection — (programming) (GC) The process by which dynamically allocated storage is reclaimed during the execution of a program. The term usually refers to automatic periodic storage reclamation by the garbage collector (part of the run-time system), as opposed to explicit code to free specific blocks of memory. Automatic garbage collection is usually triggered during memory allocation when the amount free memory falls below some threshold or after a certain number of allocations. Normal execution is suspended and the garbage collector is run. There are many variations on this basic scheme. Languages like Lisp represent expressions as graphs built from cells which contain pointers and data. These languages use automatic dynamic storage allocation to build expressions. During the evaluation of an expression it is necessary to reclaim space which is used by subexpressions but which is no longer pointed to by anything. This reclaimed memory is returned to the free memory pool for subsequent reallocation. Without garbage collection the program's memory requirements would increase monotonically throughout execution, possibly exceeding system limits on virtual memory size. The three main methods are mark-sweep garbage collection, reference counting and copying garbage collection. See also the AI koan about garbage collection.
- gas-permeable lens — a semisoft contact lens, usually removed each day, that allows air to pass through to the eye and affords a wider range of vision corrections than a soft contact lens.
- get off one's bike — to lose one's self-control
- get on sb's nerves — irritate
- get one's own back — of, relating to, or belonging to oneself or itself (usually used after a possessive to emphasize the idea of ownership, interest, or relation conveyed by the possessive): He spent only his own money.
- gilbert and george — a team of artists, Gilbert Proesch, Italian, born 1942, and George Passmore, British, born 1943: noted esp for their photomontages and performance works
- gladden sb's heart — If you say that something gladdens someone's heart, you mean that it makes them feel pleased and hopeful.
- gnu public licence — (legal) Properly known as the General Public License. Improperly known as the General Public Virus.
- golden bantam corn — a horticultural variety of sweet corn having yellow kernels.
- golden gate bridge — a bridge connecting N California with San Francisco peninsula. 4200-foot (1280-meter) center span.
- golden-brown algae — a group of mostly marine, motile algae of the phylum Chlorophyta, characterized by the presence of the pigments chlorophyll, carotene, and xanthophyll, which impart golden to yellow-brown colors.
- gooseneck barnacle — goose barnacle
- grand traverse bay — an inlet of Lake Michigan on the NW of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan.
- great pastern bone — the part of the foot of a horse, cow, etc., between the fetlock and the hoof.
- green-backed heron — a small, American heron, Butorides striatus, having glossy green wings.
- ground rule double — a safe hit ruled for two bases according to the rules of a particular stadium, as when a fly ball bounces once in the outfield and then clears a fence.
- grumbling appendix — a condition in which the appendix causes intermittent pain but appendicitis has not developed
- hamilton's problem — Hamiltonian problem
- handkerchief table — corner table.
- handlebar mustache — A handlebar mustache is a long thick mustache with curled ends.
- hardy-weinberg law — a principle stating that in an infinitely large, randomly mating population in which selection, migration, and mutation do not occur, the frequencies of alleles and genotypes do not change from generation to generation.
- have a thing about — If you have a thing about someone or something, you have very strong feelings about them.
- have money to burn — to have more money than one needs, so that some can be spent foolishly
- have on one's back — to be burdened with
- heat of combustion — the heat evolved when one mole of a substance is burnt in oxygen at constant volume
- hebdomadal council — the governing council or senate of Oxford University
- herring bone weave — a pattern consisting of adjoining vertical rows of slanting lines, any two contiguous lines forming either a V or an inverted V , used in masonry, textiles, embroidery, etc.
- herringbone stitch — a type of cross-stitch in embroidery similar to the catch stitch in sewing, consisting of an overlapped V -shaped stitch that when worked in a continuous pattern produces a twill-weave effect.
- hexachlorobiphenyl — (organic compound) Either of forty-two isomers of the polychlorinated biphenyl containing six chlorine atoms.
- highbush cranberry — a shrub, Viburnum trilobum, of northern North America, having broad clusters of white flowers and edible scarlet berries.
- honorable ordinary — any of the ordinaries believed to be among those that are oldest or that were the source of the other ordinaries, as the chief, pale, fess, bend, chevron, cross, and saltire.
- honourable mention — If something that you do in a competition is given an honourable mention, it receives special praise from the judges although it does not actually win a prize.
- how the wind blows — air in natural motion, as that moving horizontally at any velocity along the earth's surface: A gentle wind blew through the valley. High winds were forecast.
- htmlcommentbox.com — (web) A service for adding a comment box to any web page, allowing visitors to leave comments and the site owner to review them.
- hyperbilirubinemia — an abnormally high level of bilirubin in the blood, manifested by jaundice, anorexia, and malaise, occurring in association with liver disease and certain hemolytic anemias.
- impressionableness — The quality of being impressionable.
- in black and white — without colour
- in good/bad repair — If something such as a building is in good repair, it is in good condition. If it is in bad repair, it is in bad condition.
- in the belief that — If you do one thing in the belief that another thing is true or will happen, you do it because you think, usually wrongly, that it is true or will happen.
- in the same breath — the air inhaled and exhaled in respiration.
- incapacity benefit — (in Britain) a regular government payment made to people who are unable to work for an extended period through disability