18-letter words containing o, b, l
- diamondback turtle — any edible North American terrapin of the genus Malaclemys, esp M. terrapin, occurring in brackish and tidal waters and having diamond-shaped markings on the shell: family Emydidae
- didaskaleinophobia — The fear of going to school.
- diethylstilbestrol — a nonsteroidal synthetic estrogen, C 18 H 20 O 2 , used in medicine chiefly in the treatment of menopausal symptoms and in animal feeds for chemical caponization: formerly used during pregnancy for the prevention of miscarriage but discontinued owing to its association with an increased risk of vaginal and cervical cancers in women having had fetal exposure. Abbreviation: DES.
- disability pension — a pension paid to people who are unable to continue to work because of a disability
- distribution class — form class
- division of labour — a system of organizing the manufacture of an article in a series of separate specialized operations, each of which is carried out by a different worker or group of workers
- dominican republic — a republic in the West Indies, occupying the E part of the island of Hispaniola. 19,129 sq. mi. (49,545 sq. km). Capital: Santo Domingo.
- double achievement — a representation of the arms of a husband beside those of his wife such that a difference of rank between them is shown.
- double white lines — parallel white lines on a roadway, usually indicating a barrier to crossing
- double-edged sword — sth that can be both positive and negative
- double-ended queue — (algorithm) /dek/ (deque) A queue which can have items added or removed from either end[?]. The Knuth reference below reports that the name was coined by E. J. Schweppe.
- double-page spread — two pages treated as one in a publication, with images or text extending across the binding
- doubly linked list — (programming) A data structure in which each element contains pointers to the next and previous elements in the list, thus forming a bidirectional linear list.
- electronic banking — the transfer of money between financial institutions through an exchange of electronic signals over a network
- electronic mailbox — a device used to store electronic mail
- electrovalent bond — a type of chemical bond in which one atom loses an electron to form a positive ion and the other atom gains the electron to form a negative ion. The resulting ions are held together by electrostatic attraction
- elizabeth petrovna — 1709-62; empress of Russia (1741-62): daughter of Peter I
- elizabethan sonnet — Shakespearean sonnet
- engelbart, douglas — Douglas Engelbart
- executable content — (operating system) Executable programs sent by one computer to another via a network. For example a Java applet is executable content. Usage: rare.
- exhibition killing — the murder of a hostage by terrorists, filmed for broadcasting on television or the internet
- eyeball to eyeball — If you are eyeball to eyeball with someone, you are in their presence and involved in a meeting, dispute, or contest with them. You can also talk about having an eyeball to eyeball meeting or confrontation.
- fall-back position — an alternative plan
- farmer-labor party — a political party in Minnesota, founded in 1920 and merged with the Democratic Party in 1944.
- fibrocartilaginous — a type of cartilage having a large number of fibers.
- file control block — (operating system) (FCB) An MS-DOS data structure that stores information about an open file. The number of FCBs is configured in CONFIG.SYS with a command FCBS=x,y where x (between 1 and 255 inclusive, default 4) specifies the number of file control blocks to allocate and therefore the number of files that MS-DOS can have open at one time. y (not needed from DOS 5.0 onward) specifies the number of files to be closed automatically if all x are in use.
- fire in your belly — If you say that someone has fire in their belly, you are expressing approval of them because they are energetic, enthusiastic, and have very strong feelings.
- flat on one's back — lying supine
- flat-bottomed rail — a rail having a cross section like an inverted T, with the top extremity enlarged slightly to form the head
- football supporter — a person who supports a particular football team
- forget-me-not blue — a shade of blue similar to the shade of the flowers of a forget-me-not
- forward compatible — forward compatibility
- four-color problem — the problem, solved in 1976, of proving the theorem that any geographic map can be colored using only four colors so that no connected countries with a common boundary are colored the same color.
- fuller rose beetle — a beetle, Pantomorus godmani, that feeds on the leaves of roses as well as on those of citrus and other fruit trees.
- gabriele dannunzio — Gabriele [Italian gah-bree-e-le] /Italian ˌgɑ briˈɛ lɛ/ (Show IPA), (Duca Minimo) 1863–1938, Italian soldier, novelist, and poet.
- 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.
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- hamilton's problem — Hamiltonian problem
- hebdomadal council — the governing council or senate of Oxford University
- hexachlorobiphenyl — (organic compound) Either of forty-two isomers of the polychlorinated biphenyl containing six chlorine atoms.
- histocompatibility — the condition of having antigenic similarities such that cells or tissues transplanted from one (the donor) to another (the recipient) are not rejected.
- 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.