18-letter words containing o, n, t, h
- be lost in thought — If you are lost in thought, you give all your attention to what you are thinking about and do not notice what is going on around you.
- before the present — See B.P (def 4).
- behaviour patterns — the characteristic ways in which a person or animal acts
- bel and the dragon — a book of the Apocrypha that is included as chapter 14 of Daniel in the Douay Bible.
- benchmark position — a public service job used for comparison with a similar position, such as a position in commerce, for wage settlements
- benzyl thiocyanate — a colorless, crystalline, water-insoluble solid, C 8 H 7 NS, used as an insecticide.
- bernard of menthon — Saint(11th cent.); Fr. monk who founded hospices in the Swiss Alps: his day is May 28
- beyond one's depth — in water deeper than one is tall
- bird's-nest orchid — a brown parasitic Eurasian orchid, Neottia nidus-avis, whose thick fleshy roots resemble a bird's nest and contain a fungus on which the orchid feeds
- birth control pill — an oral contraceptive for women, containing the hormones estrogen and progesterone or progesterone alone, that inhibits ovulation, fertilization, or implantation of a fertilized ovum, causing temporary infertility.
- birth-control pill — an oral contraceptive for women, containing the hormones estrogen and progesterone or progesterone alone, that inhibits ovulation, fertilization, or implantation of a fertilized ovum, causing temporary infertility.
- blanche of castile — ?1188–1252, queen consort (1223–26) of Louis VIII of France, born in Spain. The mother of Louis IX, she acted as regent during his minority (1226–36) and his absence on a crusade (1248–52)
- bobo the webmonkey — (web) What B1FF was to BITNET users, Bobo the Webmonkey is to webmonkeys - the mythical prototype of incompetent web designers everywhere. In fact, Bobo may be what B1FF became when he grew up. Bobo knows about HTML only what he has learned from viewing the source of other people's Web pages. Bobo doesn't know what a MIME type is, even though someone gave him a hardcopy of the FOLDOC entry for it. Bobo may have used an HTML code validator http://validator.w3.org/ before, but isn't sure. Bobo doesn't know what the difference between GIF and JPEG is. He thinks PNG is a foreign country. All the pages Bobo has designed say "Welcome to [organisation] online!" at the top, and say "click here!" at least three times per page. Bobo has used Photoshop before; he doesn't understand why people keep asking if he's ever been tested for color-blindness. Bobo never got that "its" / "it's" distinction real clear, as you can tell from his pages. Bobo likes
- borax pentahydrate — a white, crystalline, water-soluble solid, Na 2 B 4 O 7 ⋅5H 2 O, used chiefly for killing weeds, as a water softener, and as a disinfectant and deodorizing agent.
- bore the pants off — to bore extremely
- born to the purple — being of royal or high birth
- bottle-nosed whale — any of various beaked whales of the family Hyperoodontidae, characterized by a bulbous forehead, especially Hyperoodon ampullatus of the North Atlantic.
- bottlenose dolphin — any dolphin of the genus Tursiops, esp T. truncatus, some of which have been kept in captivity and trained to perform tricks
- bottom-of-the-line — being the cheapest item of its kind made by a manufacturer; produced as inexpensively as possible (opposed to top-of-the-line): bottom-of-the-line merchandise that has no warranty.
- branch instruction — a machine-language or assembly-language instruction that causes the computer to branch to another instruction
- branch to fishkill — (IBM: from the location of one of the corporation's facilities) Any unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. See jump off into never-never land, hyperspace.
- branching fraction — (in branching) the proportion of the disintegrating nuclei that follow a particular branch to the total number of disintegrating nuclides
- breach of contract — the act of breaking the conditions of a contract
- breathe one's last — When someone breathes their last, they die.
- brightness control — a control that enables the brightness of the image on a television screen, computer monitor, etc to be adjusted
- british somaliland — a former British protectorate (1884–1960) in E Africa, on the Gulf of Aden: united with Italian Somaliland in 1960 to form Somalia (or the Somali Republic); in 1991 the self-styled republic of Somaliland, covering the same area as the former British Somaliland, declared itself independent and continues to function largely as a separate entity, though without international recognition
- broadcasting house — any of a number of buildings in the UK from which the BBC broadcasts or has broadcast
- bromochloromethane — chlorobromomethane.
- bullnose stretcher — bull stretcher (def 1).
- bullnose-stretcher — Also called bullnose stretcher. a brick having one of the edges along its length rounded for laying as a stretcher in a sill or the like.
- carpenterworm moth — any moth of the family Cossidae, as Prionoxystus robiniae of the U.S. and southern Canada, whose larvae bore into the trunks and branches of oaks, locusts, and other trees.
- cartilaginous fish — any fish of the class Chondrichthyes, including the sharks, skates, and rays, having a skeleton composed entirely of cartilage
- cash-for-questions — of, involved in, or relating to a scandal in which some MPs were accused of accepting bribes to ask particular questions in Parliament
- catch one's breath — When you catch your breath while you are doing something energetic, you stop for a short time so that you can start breathing normally again.
- catherine of siena — Saint. 1347–80, Italian mystic and ascetic; patron saint of the Dominican order. Feast day: April 29
- cellular telephone — a mobile phone
- centralized school — a public school formed from the pupils and teachers of a number of discontinued smaller schools, especially in a rural district.
- championship point — a point that would decide the winner of a match that would decide the championship
- change one's spots — to reform one's character
- character encoding — (character) (Or "character encoding scheme") A mapping between binary data values and character code positions (or "code points"). Early systems stored characters in a variety of ways, e.g. four six-bit characters in a 24-bit word, but around 1960, eight-bit bytes started to become the most common data storage layout, with each character stored in one byte, typically in the ASCII character set. In the case of ASCII, the character encoding is an identity mapping: code position 65 maps to the byte value 65. This is possible because ASCII uses only code positions representable as single bytes, i.e., values between 0 and 255. (US-ASCII only uses values 0 to 127, in fact.) From the late 1990s, there was increased use of larger character sets such as Unicode and many CJK coded character sets. These can represent characters from many languages and more symbols.
- charge conjugation — the mathematical operation of replacing every elementary particle by its antiparticle. Symbol: C.
- chebyshev equation — Tchebycheff equation.
- check verification — Check verification is a system that checks national databases of information about individuals to make sure that checks will be honored and fraud is not being committed.
- checkpoint charlie — a crossing between East and West Berlin during the Cold War
- chemical potential — a thermodynamic function of a substance in a system that is the partial differential of the Gibbs function of the system with respect to the number of moles of the substance
- chinese revolution — the overthrow of the last Manchu emperor and the establishment of a republic in China (1911–12)
- chinese watermelon — a tropical Asian vine, Benincasa hispida, of the gourd family, having a brown, hairy stem, large, solitary, yellow flowers, and white, melonlike fruit.
- chloroacetophenone — a white, crystalline, water-insoluble, poisonous solid, C 8 H 7 ClO, used in solution as a tear gas. Abbreviation: CN.
- chlorobromomethane — a clear, colorless, volatile, nonflammable liquid, CH 2 ClBr, used chiefly as an extinguishing agent in fire extinguishers and as a solvent in organic synthesis.
- chrétien de troyes — 12th century, French poet, who wrote the five Arthurian romances Erec; Cligès; Lancelot, le chevalier de la charette; Yvain, le chevalier au lion; and Perceval, le conte del Graal (?1155–?1190), the first courtly romances