12-letter words containing o, b, s, l
- board school — (formerly) a school managed by a board elected by local ratepayers
- boardsailing — windsurfing
- body bolster — the lower transverse member of a car body to which the body center plate is attached.
- body english — a follow-through motion of the body, as after bowling a ball, in a semi-involuntary or joking effort to control the ball's movement
- bog asphodel — either of two liliaceous plants, Narthecium ossifragum of Europe or N. americanum of North America, that grow in boggy places and have small yellow flowers and grasslike leaves
- boiled shirt — a dress shirt with a stiff front
- boiled sweet — Boiled sweets are hard sweets that are made from boiled sugar.
- boiler house — a building housing a boiler
- boisterously — rough and noisy; noisily jolly or rowdy; clamorous; unrestrained: the sound of boisterous laughter.
- bolshevikism — the doctrines, methods, or procedure of the Bolsheviks.
- bolshevistic — of, relating to, or characteristic of Bolshevists or Bolshevism.
- bomb shelter — a shelter, usually underground, in which people take refuge from bomb attacks
- bombay hills — a row of hills marking the southern boundary of greater Auckland on the North Island, New Zealand
- bonnet glass — monteith (def 2).
- bonnet-glass — a large punch bowl, usually of silver, having a notched rim for suspending punch cups.
- bootlessness — the quality of being useless or ineffective
- bootylicious — sexually attractive, esp with curvaceous buttocks
- borosilicate — a salt of boric and silicic acids
- borscht belt — (sometimes initial capital letters) the hotels of the predominantly Jewish resort area in the Catskill Mountains, many of them offering nightclub or cabaret entertainment.
- boskop skull — a portion of a human skull found in South Africa, of undetermined relationship and geological age: formerly associated with a hypothetical Boskop race
- bottle glass — glass used for making bottles, consisting of a silicate of sodium, calcium, and aluminium
- bottlewasher — a person or machine that washes bottles.
- bottomlessly — from a bottomless point of view
- bounce flash — a flash lamp designed to produce a bounced flash.
- bourne shell — (sh, Shellish). The original command-line interpreter shell and script language for Unix written by S.R. Bourne of Bell Laboratories in 1978. sh has been superseded for interactive use by the Berkeley C shell, csh but still widely used for writing shell scripts. There were even earlier shells, see glob. [Details?]
- box lacrosse — a form of lacrosse played indoors, usually on a hockey rink with a wooden floor, between two teams of six players.
- boyoma falls — a series of seven cataracts in the NE Democratic Republic of Congo, on the upper River Congo: forms an unnavigable stretch of 90 km (56 miles), which falls 60 m (200 ft)
- brass-collar — unwaveringly faithful to a political party; voting the straight ticket: a brass-collar Democrat.
- breastplough — a plough driven by the worker's breast, often used to pare turf
- brise-soleil — a structure used in hot climates to protect a window from the sun, usually consisting of horizontal or vertical strips of wood, concrete, etc
- bristlemouth — any of several small, deep-sea fishes of the family Gonostomatidae, having numerous sharp, slender teeth covering the jaws.
- brooks's law — (programming) "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" - a result of the fact that the expected advantage from splitting work among N programmers is O(N) (that is, proportional to N), but the complexity and communications cost associated with coordinating and then merging their work is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to the square of N). The quote is from Fred Brooks, a manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of "The Mythical Man-Month". The myth in question has been most tersely expressed as "Programmer time is fungible" and Brooks established conclusively that it is not. Hackers have never forgotten his advice; too often, management still does. See also creationism, second-system effect, optimism.
- brush flower — a flower or inflorescence with numerous long stamens, usually pollinated by birds or bats
- buffalo fish — any of a genus (Ictiobus) of large, humpbacked, freshwater sucker fishes found in North America
- bulk modulus — a coefficient of elasticity of a substance equal to minus the ratio of the applied stress (p) to the resulting fractional change in volume (dV/V) in a specified reference state (dV/V is the bulk strain)
- bull session — A bull session is an informal conversation among a small group of people.
- burro's tail — a succulent Mexican plant, Sedum morganianum, of the stonecrop family, bearing small, rose-colored flowers and long, hanging, nearly cylindrical stems with closely packed whitish-green leaves.
- bus topology — bus
- by wholesale — at wholesale
- byelorussian — Byelorussian means belonging or relating to Byelorussia or to its people or culture.
- cactoblastis — a moth, Cactoblastis cactorum of South America, that was introduced into Australia to act as a biological control on the prickly pear
- calibrations — Plural form of calibration.
- carbon steel — steel whose characteristics are determined by the amount of carbon it contains
- cassel brown — Vandyke brown.
- celebrations — Plural form of celebration.
- charlesbourg — city in S Quebec, Canada: pop. 71,000
- chondroblast — a type of cell that develops into a chondrocyte or cartilage cell
- chord symbol — any of a series of letters and numerals, used as a shorthand indication of chords, esp in jazz, folk, or pop music
- class object — (programming) In object-oriented programming, an object of class "class" that represents a class at run time. The existence of class objects allows introspection - the ability for a program to discover and modify attributes of its own code. (See self-modifying code). A class object may also be used for "housekeeping" tasks like keeping count of how many objects of the class have been created, though this may also be done by some kind of collection object. A class method is a method that operates on class objects.
- cleptobiosis — an ecological relationship in which members of one species, as of ants, steal food from another.