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21-letter words containing o, h

  • balance sheet account — A balance sheet account is an account in the chart of accounts that is reported on the balance sheet.
  • banach-tarski paradox — (mathematics)   It is possible to cut a solid ball into finitely many pieces (actually about half a dozen), and then put the pieces together again to get two solid balls, each the same size as the original. This paradox is a consequence of the Axiom of Choice.
  • be at pains to do sth — If someone is at pains to do something, they are very eager and anxious to do it, especially because they want to avoid a difficult situation.
  • be in the melting pot — If something is in the melting pot, you do not know what is going to happen to it.
  • be on the danger list — to be critically ill in hospital
  • be on to a good thing — to be in a profitable situation or position
  • be supposed to do sth — If you say that something is supposed to happen, you mean that it is planned or expected. Sometimes this use suggests that the thing does not really happen in this way.
  • been there, done that — in or at that place (opposed to here): She is there now.
  • behavior modification — a technique that seeks to modify animal and human behavior through application of the principles of conditioning, in which rewards and reinforcements, or punishments, are used to establish desired habits, or patterns of behavior
  • behavioural contagion — the spread of a particular type of behaviour, such as crying, through a crowd or group of people
  • behind someone's back — without someone's knowledge or consent
  • benzalkonium chloride — a white or yellowish-white, water-soluble mixture of ammonium chloride derivatives having the structure C 8 H 10 NRCl, where R is a mixture of radicals ranging from C 8 H 17 – to C 18 H 37 –, that occurs as an amorphous powder or in gelatinous lumps: used chiefly as an antiseptic and a disinfectant.
  • benzethonium chloride — a colorless, water-soluble, crystalline solid, ammonium chloride derivative, (C 27 H 42 O 2 N)Cl⋅H 2 O, used chiefly as an antiseptic.
  • bibliographic control — the identification, description, analysis, and classification of books and other materials of communication so that they may be effectively organized, stored, retrieved, and used when needed.
  • bibliographic utility — an organization that maintains computerized bibliographic records and offers to its members or customers various products and services related to these records.
  • bichloride of mercury — mercuric chloride
  • biobehavioral science — any of the various branches of the life sciences, as neurobiology, neurochemistry, or neuroendocrinology, that deal with biological aspects of behavior.
  • biological psychiatry — a school of psychiatric thought concerned with the medical treatment of mental disorders, especially through medication, and emphasizing the relationship between behavior and brain function and the search for physical causes of mental illness.
  • black-headed fireworm — the larva of any of several moths, as Rhopobota naevana (black-headed fireworm) which feeds on the leaves of cranberries and causes them to wither.
  • blot on the landscape — If you describe something such as a building as a blot on the landscape, you mean that you think it is very ugly and spoils an otherwise attractive place.
  • blow the whistle (on) — to report or inform (on)
  • bluethroat pikeblenny — See under pikeblenny.
  • bonnie prince charlie — a member of the royal family that ruled in Scotland from 1371 to 1714 and in England from 1603 to 1714.
  • bottlebrush moustache — a short, bristly moustache
  • bovine growth hormone — a growth hormone of cattle; esp., this hormone synthesized artificially and administered to beef cattle to increase growth rate and reduce fat and to dairy cows to increase milk production
  • bow to the inevitable — If someone bows to the inevitable and does something that they do not want to do, they do it, because circumstances force them to do it.
  • break someone's heart — an act or instance of breaking; disruption or separation of parts; fracture; rupture: There was a break in the window.
  • break the fourth wall — (esp of a character in a television programme, film, or play) to refer to, acknowledge, or address the audience, usually for comedic effect or as an avante-garde technique
  • breakthrough bleeding — bleeding from the uterus that occurs between menstrual periods
  • breath-of-life packet — (XEROX PARC) An Ethernet packet that contains bootstrap code, periodically sent out from a working computer to infuse the "breath of life" into any computer on the network that has crashed. Computers depending on such packets have sufficient hardware or firmware code to wait for (or request) such a packet during the reboot process. See also dickless workstation. The notional "kiss-of-death packet", with a function complementary to that of a breath-of-life packet, is recommended for dealing with hosts that consume too many network resources. Though "kiss-of-death packet" is usually used in jest, there is at least one documented instance of an Internet subnet with limited address-table slots in a gateway computer in which such packets were routinely used to compete for slots, rather like Christmas shoppers competing for scarce parking spaces.
  • british north america — (formerly) Canada or its constituent regions or provinces that formed part of the British Empire
  • broadleaved whitebeam — a whitebeam, Sorbus latifolia, widely found in France and England, also planted as an ornamental
  • bryan-chamorro treaty — a treaty (1914) between the U.S. and Nicaragua by which the U.S. secured exclusive rights to build a canal across Nicaragua, to connect the Atlantic and Pacific.
  • burn the midnight oil — to work or study late into the night
  • burroughs corporation — (company)   A company which merged with Sperry Univac to form Unisys Corporation. They produced the Datatron 200 series among other computers.
  • businessman's holiday — busman's holiday.
  • cat on a hot tin roof — a play (1955) by Tennessee Williams.
  • catch one flat footed — having flatfeet.
  • category merchandiser — A category merchandiser is a person whose job is to maintain stocks, manage displays and promote sales of a certain product category such as footwear.
  • catherine of braganza — 1638–1705, wife of Charles II of England, daughter of John IV of Portugal
  • caviar to the general — a thing appealing only to a highly cultivated taste: Hamlet II, ii
  • central limit theorem — any of several theorems stating that the sum of a number of random variables obeying certain conditions will assume a normal distribution as the number of variables becomes large.
  • certificate authority — (cryptography, body)   (CA or "Trusted Third Party") An entity (typically a company) that issues digital certificates to other entities (organisations or individuals) to allow them to prove their identity to others. A Certificate Authority might be an external company such as VeriSign that offers digital certificate services or they might be an internal organisation such as a corporate MIS department. The Certificate Authority's chief function is to verify the identity of entities and issue digital certificates attesting to that identity. The process uses public key cryptography to create a "network of trust". If I want to prove my identity to you, I ask a CA (who you trust to have verified my identity) to encrypt a hash of my signed key with their private key. Then you can use the CA's public key to decrypt the hash and compare it with a hash you calculate yourself. Hashes are used to decrease the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. The hash function must be cryptographically strong, e.g. MD5.
  • character development — the portrayal of people in a work of fiction in such a way that the reader or audience seems to learn more about them as they develop
  • character recognition — Character recognition is a process which allows computers to recognize written or printed characters such as numbers or letters and to change them into a form that the computer can use.
  • characteristic vector — a vector for which there exists a scalar such that the value of the vector under a given transformation is equal to the scalar times the vector.
  • charge-coupled device — an electronic device, used in imaging and signal processing, in which information is represented as packets of electric charge that are stored in an array of tiny closely spaced capacitors and can be moved from one capacitor to another in a controlled way
  • charity commissioners — (in Britain) members of a commission constituted to keep a register of charities and control charitable trusts
  • charterhouse of parma — a novel (1839) by Stendhal.
  • chequebook journalism — Chequebook journalism is the practice of paying people large sums of money for information about crimes or famous people in order to get material for newspaper articles.
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