21-letter words containing o, l, e, n, t
- bernadette of lourdes — Saint. original name Marie Bernarde Soubirous. 1844–79, French peasant girl born in Lourdes, whose visions of the Virgin Mary led to the establishment of Lourdes as a centre of pilgrimage, esp for the sick or crippled. Feast day: Feb 18
- beyond (all) question — beyond (any) dispute or doubt
- binomial nomenclature — a system for naming plants and animals by means of two Latin names: the first indicating the genus and the second the species to which the organism belongs, as in Panthera leo (the lion)
- 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 one's brains out — to kill oneself by shooting oneself in the head
- blow the whistle (on) — to report or inform (on)
- blow your own trumpet — If you blow your own trumpet or blow your own horn, you tell people that you are very clever or successful.
- bluethroat pikeblenny — See under pikeblenny.
- boiling-water reactor — a nuclear reactor using water as coolant and moderator, steam being produced in the reactor itself: enriched uranium oxide cased in zirconium is the fuel
- 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.
- breakthrough bleeding — bleeding from the uterus that occurs between menstrual periods
- bromine pentafluoride — a colorless, corrosive liquid, BrF 5 , used as an oxidizer in liquid rocket propellants.
- built-in obsolescence — a method of stimulating consumer demand by designing products that wear out or become outmoded after limited use.
- bulletin board system — (communications, application) (BBS, bboard /bee'bord/, message board, forum; plural: BBSes) A computer and associated software which typically provides an electronic message database where people can log in and leave messages. Messages are typically split into topic groups similar to the newsgroups on Usenet (which is like a distributed BBS). Any user may submit or read any message in these public areas. The term comes from physical pieces of board on which people can pin messages written on paper for general consumption - a "physical bulletin board". Ward Christensen, the programmer and operator of the first BBS (on-line 1978-02-16) called it a CBBS for "computer bulletin board system". Since the rise of the World-Wide Web, the term has become antiquated, though the concept is more popular than ever, with many websites featuring discussion areas where users can post messages for public consumption. Apart from public message areas, some BBSes provided archives of files, personal electronic mail and other services of interest to the system operator (sysop). Thousands of BBSes around the world were run from amateurs' homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Although BBSes were traditionally the domain of hobbyists, many connected directly to the Internet (accessed via telnet), others were operated by government, educational, and research institutions. Fans of Usenet or the big commercial time-sharing bboards such as CompuServe, CIX and GEnie tended to consider local BBSes the low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they helped connect hackers and users in the personal-micro and let them exchange code. Use of this term for a Usenet newsgroup generally marks one either as a newbie fresh in from the BBS world or as a real old-timer predating Usenet.
- burn the midnight oil — to work or study late into the night
- butterfly common lisp — A parallel version of Common LISP for the BBN Butterfly computer.
- button up (one's lip) — to refrain from talking; esp., to keep a secret
- cancellation deadline — A cancellation deadline is a date before which you must cancel a hotel reservation without paying any money.
- canticle of canticles — another name for the Song of Solomon, used in the Douay Bible
- cantilever foundation — a building foundation supporting its load partly or wholly upon cantilevers.
- castellon de la plana — a port in E Spain. Pop: 160 714 (2003 est)
- catch one flat footed — having flatfeet.
- caviar to the general — a thing appealing only to a highly cultivated taste: Hamlet II, ii
- central european time — the standard time adopted by Western European countries one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, corresponding to British Summer Time
- 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.
- 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
- choledochojejunostomy — (medicine) The surgical formation of an opening between the common bile duct and the jejunum.
- circle of declination — hour circle.
- civil rights movement — campaign for human freedoms
- class-relation method — (programming) A design technique based on the concepts of object-oriented programming and the Entity-Relationship model from the French company Softeam.
- clayton-bulwer treaty — an agreement between the U.S. and Great Britain in 1850 guaranteeing that any canal built to connect the Atlantic and Pacific across Central America would be jointly controlled, open to all nations, and unfortified.
- clement of alexandria — Saint. original name Titus Flavius Clemens. ?150–?215 ad, Greek Christian theologian: head of the catechetical school at Alexandria; teacher of Origen. Feast day: Dec 5
- cognitive development — the process of acquiring intelligence and increasingly advanced thought and problem-solving ability from infancy to adulthood.
- collective bargaining — When a trade union engages in collective bargaining, it has talks with an employer about its members' pay and working conditions.
- collimator viewfinder — a type of viewfinder in a camera
- collins street farmer — a businessman who invests in farms, land, etc
- column address strobe — (hardware) (CAS) A signal sent from a processor (or memory controller) to a dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) (qv) circuit to indicate that the column address lines are valid.
- combination principle — Ritz combination principle.
- come in from the cold — to come out of exile, isolation, etc.; resume an active role
- comfortably-furnished — containing comfortable furniture
- commercial television — television companies which make money by selling advertising
- commercial translator — (language) An English-like pre-COBOL language for business data processing.
- committal proceedings — a preliminary hearing in a magistrates' court to decide if there is a case to answer
- competitive exclusion — the dominance of one species over another when both are competing for the same resources, etc
- completing the square — a method, usually of solving quadratic equations, by which a quadratic expression, as x 2 − 4 x + 3, is written as the sum or difference of a perfect square and a constant, x 2 − 4 x + 4 + 3 − 4 = (x − 2) 2 − 1, by addition and subtraction of appropriate constant terms.
- componential analysis — the analysis of a set of related linguistic items, especially word meanings, into combinations of features in terms of which each item may be compared with every other, as in the analysis of man into the semantic features “male,” “mature,” and “human,” woman into “female,” “mature,” and “human,” girl into “female,” “immature,” and “human,” and bull into “male,” “mature,” and “bovine.”.
- concurrent resolution — a resolution passed by one branch of a legislature and concurred in by the other, indicating the opinion of the legislature but not having the force of law
- conditional discharge — If someone who is convicted of an offence is given a conditional discharge by a court, they are not punished unless they later commit a further offence.
- conditional operation — a step in a computer program that determines which of two or more instructions or instruction sequences to execute next, depending on whether or not one or more specified conditions have been met.
- conference facilities — Conference facilities are large rooms and pieces of equipment that a hotel provides so an organization can have conference there.