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19-letter words containing o, p, t, e

  • be burnt to a crisp — If something is burnt to a crisp, it is completely burnt.
  • be up to one's neck — the part of the body of an animal or human being that connects the head and the trunk.
  • beauty preparations — the cosmetics, creams etc used to improve someone's beauty
  • benefit performance — a theatrical or musical performance in aid of charity
  • beta-naphthyl group — See under naphthyl.
  • binomial experiment — an experiment consisting of a fixed number of independent trials each with two possible outcomes, success and failure, and the same probability of success. The probability of a given number of successes is described by a binominal distribution
  • bit-paired keyboard — (hardware)   (Obsolete, or "bit-shift keyboard") A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed. In order to avoid making the thing more of a Rube Goldberg kluge than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the same basic bit pattern on one key. Looking at the ASCII chart, we find: high low bits bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 010 ! " # $ % & ' ( ) 011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). This was *not* the weirdest variant of the QWERTY layout widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029 card punches. When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, there was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product look like an office typewriter. These alternatives became known as "bit-paired" and "typewriter-paired" keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical - and because most hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was little pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter standard. The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The "typewriter-paired" standard became universal, "bit-paired" hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse.
  • blackstrap molasses — the molasses remaining after the maximum quantity of sugar has been extracted from the raw material
  • blast from the past — You can use a blast from the past as a light-hearted way of referring to something such as an old song or fashion that you hear or notice again, and which reminds you of an earlier time.
  • blot one's copybook — to spoil one's reputation by making a mistake, offending against social customs, etc
  • blue-ringed octopus — a highly venomous octopus, Octopus maculosus, of E Australia which exhibits blue bands on its tentacles when disturbed
  • box-office receipts — the money earned from ticket sales for a film or play
  • breach of the peace — A breach of the peace is noisy or violent behaviour in a public place which is illegal because it disturbs other people.
  • bring into the open — to make evident or public
  • brush-tailed possum — any of several widely-distributed Australian possums of the genus Trichosurus
  • by one's bootstraps — by one's own efforts; unaided
  • camouflage passport — a passport from a non-existent country intended to conceal the bearer's true nationality (from hijackers, kidnappers, etc)
  • cannot help oneself — to be the victim of circumstances, a habit, etc.
  • capacitive coupling — the connection of two or more circuits by means of a capacitor.
  • cape-disappointment — Cape, a cape in SW Washington state, projecting into the Pacific Ocean on the N of the mouth of the Columbia River.
  • captains courageous — a novel (1897) by Rudyard Kipling.
  • carbon steel piping — Carbon steel piping is pipes made of steel with carbon as the main alloying component, used for transporting fluids.
  • caterpillar tractor — a tractor powered by a Caterpillar track
  • cathodic protection — a technique for protecting metal structures, such as steel ships and pipelines, from electrolytic corrosion by making the structure the cathode in a cell, either by applying an electromotive force directly or by putting it into contact with a more electropositive metal
  • chamber of deputies — the lower house of the legislature of certain countries, as Italy.
  • champagne socialist — a professed socialist who enjoys an extravagant lifestyle
  • chemolithoautotroph — (biology) A chemoautotroph or lithoautotroph.
  • chief petty officer — the senior naval rank for personnel without commissioned or warrant rank
  • christmas pantomime — pantomime (def 5).
  • cinematographically — a motion-picture projector.
  • co-respondent shoes — men's two-coloured shoes, usually black and white or brown and white
  • coherent parallel c — (language)   A data parallel version of C.
  • college-preparatory — preparing a student for academic work at the college level.
  • columnar epithelium — epithelium consisting of one or more layers of elongated cells of cylindrical or prismatic shape.
  • combination therapy — a therapy that combines two or more drugs, or two or more treatments
  • command interpreter — (operating system)   A program which reads textual commands from the user or from a file and executes them. Some commands may be executed directly within the interpreter itself (e.g. setting variables or control constructs), others may cause it to load and execute other files. When an IBM PC is booted BIOS loads and runs the MS-DOS command interpreter into memory from file COMMAND.COM found on a floppy disk or hard disk drive. The commands that COMMAND.COM recognizes (e.g. COPY, DIR, PRN) are called internal commands, in contrast to external commands which are executable files.
  • command line option — (software)   (Or "option", "flag", "switch", "option switch") An argument to a command that modifies its function rather than providing data. Options generally start with "-" in Unix or "/" in MS-DOS. This is usually followed by a single letter or occasionally a digit. More recently, GNU software adopted the --longoptionname style, usually in addition to traditional, single-character, -x style equivalents. Some commands require each option to be a separate argument, introduced by a new "-" or "/", others allow multiple option letters to be concatenated into a single argument with a single "-" or "/", e.g. "ls -al". A few Unix commands (e.g. ar, tar) allow the "-" to be omitted. Some options may or must be followed by a value, e.g. "cc prog.c -o prog", sometimes with and sometimes without an intervening space.
  • community policeman — a police officer assigned to a particular area
  • community programme — (in Britain) a former government scheme to provide temporary work for people unemployed for over a year
  • compact disc player — a machine for playing compact discs
  • compact disc writer — (storage)   (CD burner) A device that can write data to Compact Disc Recordable (CD-R) or Compact Disc Rewritable (CD-RW) discs. Now both these CD formats are often combined with a DVD writer.
  • compact disk player — a device for playing compact disks.
  • compassionate leave — Compassionate leave is time away from your work that your employer allows you for personal reasons, especially when a member of your family dies or is seriously ill.
  • competitive bidding — a system by which a contract is awarded to the lowest bidder
  • complement fixation — the fixing of complement into the product of an antigen-antibody reaction: used as an infection indicator in certain serologic tests that measure the presence or absence of free, active complement
  • complement-sentence — a subordinate clause that functions as the subject, direct object, or prepositional object of a verb, as that you like it in I'm surprised that you like it.
  • complementary angle — either of two angles whose sum is 90°
  • complementary color — Art. one of a pair of primary or secondary colors opposed to the other member of the pair on a schematic chart or scale (color wheel) as green opposed to red, orange opposed to blue, or violet opposed to yellow. Compare analogous color. the relationship of these pairs of colors perceived as completing or enhancing each other.
  • complete fertilizer — a fertilizer containing nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, the three principal elements required for plant nutrition.
  • complete quadrangle — a plane figure consisting of four points connected by six lines
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