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19-letter words containing o, r, a, t, e

  • beauty preparations — the cosmetics, creams etc used to improve someone's beauty
  • behavioral genetics — an interdisciplinary field studying the effects of genetics and hereditary factors on animal and human behavior.
  • benefit performance — a theatrical or musical performance in aid of charity
  • beta-naphthyl group — See under naphthyl.
  • betamethyl acrolein — crotonaldehyde.
  • bicarbonate of soda — Bicarbonate of soda is a white powder which is used in baking to make cakes rise, and also as a medicine for your stomach.
  • binary large object — (database)   (BLOB) A large block of data stored in a database, such as an image or sound file. A BLOB has no structure which can be interpreted by the database management system but is known only by its size and location.
  • 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.
  • black forest gateau — a chocolate sponge cake containing morello cherries and whipped cream, with a topping of chocolate icing
  • black-footed ferret — a musteline mammal, Mustela nigripes, of W North America, closely related to the weasels
  • 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.
  • blue stellar object — any of a class of blue celestial objects, at one time thought to be stars, that do not emit appreciable radio waves. Abbreviation: BSO.
  • blue-tongued lizard — a large Australian lizard, Tiliqua scincoides, characterized by having a cobalt-blue tongue.
  • board certification — the process of certifying that a physician has passed an examination and met the standards of a professional organization representing a particular medical specialty.
  • board of trade unit — a unit of electrical energy equal to 1 kilowatt-hour
  • boat-tailed grackle — a large grackle, Quiscalus major, of the southeastern U.S., that folds its tail into a shape resembling the keel of a boat.
  • booker t washington — Booker T(aliaferro) [boo k-er tol-uh-ver] /ˈbʊk ər ˈtɒl ə vər/ (Show IPA), 1856–1915, U.S. reformer, educator, author, and lecturer.
  • bracket abstraction — (compiler)   An algorithm which turns a term into a function of some variable. The result of using bracket abstraction on T with respect to variable v, written as [v]T, is a term containing no occurrences of v and denoting a function f such that f v = T. This defines the function f = (\ v . T). Using bracket abstraction and currying we can define a language without bound variables in which the only operation is monadic function application. See combinator.
  • 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.
  • breath of fresh air — sth new
  • brush-tailed possum — any of several widely-distributed Australian possums of the genus Trichosurus
  • bulbourethral gland — Cowper's gland
  • buster brown collar — a medium-sized, starched collar with rounded edges, lying flat on the shoulders, worn by women and girls.
  • 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 very well do — If you say that you cannot very well do something, you mean that it would not be right or possible to do it.
  • 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.
  • carnot refrigerator — a device operating on the Carnot cycle in which the first temperature is higher than the second.
  • catalytic converter — A catalytic converter is a device which is fitted to a car's exhaust to reduce the pollution coming from it.
  • catalytic reforming — Catalytic reforming is a process that converts petroleum refinery naphthas to high-octane blending components.
  • category management — the management of a range of related products in a way designed to increase sales of all of the products
  • caterpillar tractor — a tractor powered by a Caterpillar track
  • catherine of aragon — 1485–1536, first wife of Henry VIII of England and mother of Mary I. The annulment of Henry's marriage to her (1533) against papal authority marked an initial stage in the English Reformation
  • 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
  • center of curvature — the center of the circle of curvature.
  • central reservation — The central reservation is the strip of ground, often covered with grass, that separates the two sides of a major road.
  • centre of curvature — the point on the normal at a given point on a curve on the concave side of the curve whose distance from the point on the curve is equal to the radius of curvature
  • cerebral thrombosis — formation of a clot or other blockage in one of the blood vessels of the brain, often followed by neurologic damage; a type of stroke.
  • chamber of deputies — the lower house of the legislature of certain countries, as Italy.
  • character generator — a device used in television studios to incorporate text or other symbols into the television screen image.
  • characteristic root — a scalar for which there exists a nonzero vector such that the scalar times the vector equals the value of the vector under a given linear transformation on a vector space.
  • chassis dynamometer — A chassis dynamometer is a piece of test equipment fitted with rollers for the wheels of a vehicle, that is capable of providing drive input and measuring output such as power and torque at the wheels.
  • chemical castration — the use of drugs to reduce libido
  • chemolithoautotroph — (biology) A chemoautotroph or lithoautotroph.
  • cherenkov radiation — the electromagnetic radiation produced when a charged particle moves through a medium at a greater velocity than the velocity of light in that medium
  • chinese tallow tree — tallow tree.
  • chlorofluoromethane — any of a series of gaseous or volatile methanes substituted with chlorine and fluorine and containing little or no hydrogen: used as refrigerants and, formerly, as aerosol propellants until scientists became concerned about depletion of the atmospheric ozone layer.
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