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19-letter words containing o, r, b, i, e

  • bird's-eye primrose — a Eurasian primrose, Primula farinosa, having clusters of purplish flowers with yellow centres
  • bird's-foot trefoil — any of various creeping leguminous Eurasian plants of the genus Lotus, esp L. corniculatus, with red-tipped yellow flowers and seed pods resembling the claws of a bird
  • bismuth oxychloride — a white, crystalline, water-insoluble powder, BiOCl, used chiefly in the manufacture of pigments, face powders, and artificial pearls.
  • 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 warrior river — a river in N central Alabama, flowing SW past Birmingham to the Tombigbee River. 178 miles (286 km) long.
  • blackbelly rosefish — a reddish scorpionfish, Helicolenus dactylopterus, inhabiting the deep waters of the western Atlantic Ocean.
  • blood-brain barrier — the barrier created by the walls of the capillaries of the brain that prevents certain substances, as most proteins and drugs, from passing from the blood into the brain tissue and cerebrospinal fluid
  • blowing your buffer — (jargon)   Losing your train of thought. A reference to buffer overflow.
  • blue screen of life — (operating system)   (BSOL, by analogy with "Blue Screen of Death") The opening screen of Microsoft Windows NT. This screen shows the file system loading, and any problems such as conversions from FAT to NTFS or a scan of a hard drive. The Blue Screen of Life occurs in one way, as opposed to the Blue Screen of Death, which can occur in many different ways and times.
  • blue-ringed octopus — a highly venomous octopus, Octopus maculosus, of E Australia which exhibits blue bands on its tentacles when disturbed
  • 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.
  • bode ill (or well) — to be a bad (or good) omen
  • 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.
  • bordering countries — countries that share a border with a particular country
  • box-office receipts — the money earned from ticket sales for a film or play
  • 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.
  • breath of fresh air — sth new
  • brimstone butterfly — a common yellow butterfly, Gonepteryx rhamni, of N temperate regions of the Old World: family Pieridae
  • bring into the open — to make evident or public
  • brokered convention — a party convention in which many delegates are pledged to favorite sons who use their blocs of votes to bargain with leading candidates who lack a majority of delegate support.
  • brush-tailed possum — any of several widely-distributed Australian possums of the genus Trichosurus
  • california bluebell — either of two plants, Phacelia campanularia or P. minor, of southern California, having ovate leaves and bell-shaped blue or purple flowers.
  • california job case — a job case having sufficient spaces to contain both uppercase and lowercase letters and 37 additional characters of foundry type. Compare case2 (def 8).
  • carbon dioxide snow — solid carbon dioxide, used as a refrigerant
  • carbon steel piping — Carbon steel piping is pipes made of steel with carbon as the main alloying component, used for transporting fluids.
  • caroline of ansbach — 1683–1737, wife of George II of Great Britain
  • 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.
  • cerebrospinal fluid — the clear colourless fluid in the spaces inside and around the spinal cord and brain
  • chamber of deputies — the lower house of the legislature of certain countries, as Italy.
  • chlorobromide paper — a relatively fast printing paper coated with an emulsion of silver chloride and silver bromide.
  • cobaltous hydroxide — a rose-red, amorphous, water-insoluble powder, Co 2 O 3 ⋅3H 2 O, used chiefly in the preparation of cobalt salts and in the manufacture of paint and varnish driers.
  • collective behavior — the spontaneous, unstructured, and temporary behavior of a group of people in response to the same event, situation, etc.
  • combination therapy — a therapy that combines two or more drugs, or two or more treatments
  • connecticut warbler — a North American wood warbler, Oporornis agilis, olive-green above with a gray head and throat and yellow below.
  • coordination number — the number of coordinated species surrounding the central atom in a complex or crystal
  • corrosive sublimate — mercuric chloride
  • counterpoise bridge — another name for bascule bridge
  • crown green bowling — (in Britain) bowls played on a crown green
  • cudgel one's brains — to think hard about a problem
  • de broglie equation — the postulate of wave mechanics that a particle of mass m moving at a velocity v will have the properties of a wave of wavelength h / mv (de Broglie wavelength) where h is Planck's constant.
  • deoxyribonucleoside — a compound composed of deoxyribose and either a purine or a pyrimidine.
  • deoxyribonucleotide — an ester of a deoxyribonucleoside and phosphoric acid; a constituent of DNA.
  • devils-on-horseback — a savoury of prunes wrapped in bacon slices and served on toast
  • diethylstilbesterol — Misspelling of diethylstilbestrol\u200e.
  • diethylstilboestrol — Diethylstilbestrol.
  • distribution system — The distribution system is the part of an electric system after the transmission system that is dedicated to delivering electric energy to an end user.
  • double counterpoint — invertible counterpoint using two transposable voices.
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