0%

19-letter words containing o, b, s, c

  • bordering countries — countries that share a border with a particular country
  • boundary commission — (in Britain) a body established by statute to undertake periodic reviews of the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies and to recommend changes to take account of population shifts
  • box-office receipts — the money earned from ticket sales for a film or play
  • bracket abstraction — (compiler)   An algorithm which turns a term into a function of some variable. The result of using bracket abstraction on T with respect to variable v, written as [v]T, is a term containing no occurrences of v and denoting a function f such that f v = T. This defines the function f = (\ v . T). Using bracket abstraction and currying we can define a language without bound variables in which the only operation is monadic function application. See combinator.
  • business accounting — the keeping of detailed accounts relating to a business or businesses
  • buster brown collar — a medium-sized, starched collar with rounded edges, lying flat on the shoulders, worn by women and girls.
  • california job case — a job case having sufficient spaces to contain both uppercase and lowercase letters and 37 additional characters of foundry type. Compare case2 (def 8).
  • captain abstraction — The champion of the principles of abstraction and modularity, who protects unwary students on MIT's course 6.001 from the nefarious designs of Sergeant Spaghetticode and his vile concrete programming practices. See also spaghetti code.
  • carbon dioxide snow — solid carbon dioxide, used as a refrigerant
  • carbon steel piping — Carbon steel piping is pipes made of steel with carbon as the main alloying component, used for transporting fluids.
  • cardbox for windows — (database)   A database handling program, especially useful for scholars and librarians.
  • caroline of ansbach — 1683–1737, wife of George II of Great Britain
  • cerebellar syndrome — a disease of the cerebellum characterized by unsteady movements and mispronunciation of words
  • cerebral thrombosis — formation of a clot or other blockage in one of the blood vessels of the brain, often followed by neurologic damage; a type of stroke.
  • cerebrospinal fluid — the clear colourless fluid in the spaces inside and around the spinal cord and brain
  • chamber of deputies — the lower house of the legislature of certain countries, as Italy.
  • chlorofluorocarbons — Plural form of chlorofluorocarbon.
  • chromoblastomycosis — Long-term fungal infection of the skin and subcutaneous tissue.
  • cobaltous hydroxide — a rose-red, amorphous, water-insoluble powder, Co 2 O 3 ⋅3H 2 O, used chiefly in the preparation of cobalt salts and in the manufacture of paint and varnish driers.
  • cock and bull story — an absurd, improbable story presented as the truth: Don't ask him about his ancestry unless you want to hear a cock-and-bull story.
  • cock-and-bull story — If you describe something that someone tells you as a cock-and-bull story, you mean that you do not believe it is true.
  • come to sb's notice — If something comes to your notice, you become aware of it.
  • contagious abortion — brucellosis of domestic cattle, an infectious disease characterized by spontaneous abortion and caused by the bacterium Brucella abortus; Bang's disease.
  • coronary thrombosis — A coronary thrombosis is the same as a coronary.
  • corrosive sublimate — mercuric chloride
  • counterpoise bridge — another name for bascule bridge
  • cowboys and indians — a children's game in which players imitate the supposed behavior of cowboys and Indians in conflict, as in shooting, chasing, and capturing.
  • cudgel one's brains — to think hard about a problem
  • deathbed confession — a confession that somebody makes just before he or she dies, usually relating to some long concealed crime or secret
  • deoxyribonucleoside — a compound composed of deoxyribose and either a purine or a pyrimidine.
  • detective constable — a police officer who investigates crime and who is of the lowest rank
  • developable surface — a surface that can be flattened onto a plane without stretching or compressing any part of it, as a circular cone.
  • devils-on-horseback — a savoury of prunes wrapped in bacon slices and served on toast
  • dobsonian telescope — a relatively inexpensive Newtonian telescope, suitable for visual but not photographic use, in which the tube assembly slips freely in the lower base.
  • dry-bulk cargo ship — a ship that carries an unpackaged dry cargo such as coal or grain; bulk carrier
  • electro-shock baton — a baton used as a weapon to pass an electric current through part of the body
  • essence of bergamot — a fragrant essential oil from the fruit rind of this plant, used in perfumery and some teas (including Earl Grey)
  • exhibitionistically — In an exhibitionistic manner.
  • financial ombudsman — any of five British ombudsmen: the Banking Ombudsman, set up in 1986 to investigate complaints from bank customers; the Building Society Ombudsman, set up in 1987 to investigate complaints from building society customers; the Insurance Ombudsman, set up in 1981 to investigate complaints by policyholders (since 1988 this ombudsman has also operated a Unit Trust Ombudsman scheme); the Investment Ombudsman set up in 1989 to investigate complaints by investors (the Personal Investment Authority Ombudsman is responsible for investigating complaints by personal investors); and the Pensions Ombudsman, set up in 1993 to investigate complaints regarding pension schemes
  • foundation subjects — the subjects studied as part of the National Curriculum, including the compulsory core subjects
  • functional database — (database, language)   A database which uses a functional language as its query language. Databases would seem to be an inappropriate application for functional languages since, a purely functional language would have to return a new copy of the entire database every time (part of) it was updated. To be practically scalable, the update mechanism must clearly be destructive rather than functional; however it is quite feasible for the query language to be purely functional so long as the database is considered as an argument. One approach to the update problem would use a monad to encapsulate database access and ensure it was single threaded. Alternative approaches have been suggested by Trinder, who suggests non-destructive updating with shared data structures, and Sutton who uses a variant of a Phil Wadler's linear type system. There are two main classes of functional database languages. The first is based upon Backus' FP language, of which FQL is probably the best known example. Adaplan is a more recent language which falls into this category. More recently, people have been working on languages which are syntactically very similar to modern functional programming languages, but which also provide all of the features of a database language, e.g. bulk data structures which can be incrementally updated, type systems which can be incrementally updated, and all data persisting in a database. Examples are PFL [Poulovassilis&Small, VLDB-91], and Machiavelli [Ohori et al, ACM SIGMOD Conference, 1998].
  • gigabits per second — (unit)   (Gbps) A unit of information transfer rate equal to one billion bits per second. Note that, while a gigabit is defined as a power of two (2^30 bits), a gigabit per second is defined as a power of ten (10^9 bits per second, which is slightly less) than 2^30).
  • handlebar moustache — a man's moustache having long, curved ends that resemble the handlebars of a bicycle.
  • honorable discharge — a discharge from military service of a person who has fulfilled obligations efficiently, honorably, and faithfully.
  • hydrostatic balance — a balance for finding the weight of an object submerged in water in order to determine the upthrust on it and thus determine its relative density
  • hyperbolic cosecant — a hyperbolic function that is the reciprocal of hyperbolic sine
  • immersion objective — a microscope objective of high resolving power in which the space between the front lens and the cover glass is filled with an oil whose index of refraction is close to that of the objective and the cover glass.
  • incommensurableness — (rare) Incommensurability.
  • incomprehensibility — impossible to understand or comprehend; unintelligible.
  • internal-combustion — of or relating to an internal-combustion engine.
Was this page helpful?
Yes No
Thank you for your feedback! Tell your friends about this page
Tell us why?