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16-letter words containing o, r, b

  • before your time — If you say that something was before your time, you mean that it happened or existed before you were born or before you were able to know about it or remember it.
  • behavior pattern — a recurrent way of acting by an individual or group toward a given object or in a given situation.
  • behavior therapy — therapy employing behavior modification
  • behavioural sink — a small area in which people or animals live in overcrowded conditions
  • bells of ireland — an annual garden plant, Moluccella laevis, whose flowers have a green cup-shaped calyx: family Lamiaceae (labiates)
  • beneficial owner — a person entitled to receive the profits or proceeds of property
  • benzotrichloride — a colorless or yellowish liquid, C 7 H 5 Cl 3 , used chiefly in the manufacture of dyes.
  • benzotrifluoride — a colorless, flammable liquid, C 7 H 5 F 3 , used chiefly as an intermediate in the manufacture of dyes and pharmaceuticals, and as a solvent.
  • benzoyl peroxide — a white, crystalline, water-insoluble, explosive solid, C 7 H 5 O 4 , used chiefly as a bleaching agent for flour, fats, oils, and waxes, and as a catalyst in polymerization reactions.
  • berkeley network — (B-NET) Top level Unix Ethernet software developed at the University of California at Berkeley. There are no formal specifications but UCB's 4.2BSD Unix implementation on the VAX is the de facto standard. Distributed by Unisoft. Includes net.o driver routines for specific hardware, pseudo ttys, daemons, hostname command to set/get name, /etc/hosts database of names and Internet addresses of other hosts, /etc/hosts.equiv host-wide database to control remote access, .rhosts per user version of hosts.equiv. UCB's implementation of the Internet Protocol includes trailers to improve performance on paged memory management systems such as VAXen. These trailers are an exception to the Internet Protocol specification.
  • bermuda palmetto — a palm, Sabal bermudana, of Bermuda, having small, roundish, black fruit and leaves that are checkered beneath.
  • bernoulli effect — the decrease in pressure as the velocity of a fluid increases.
  • bertillon system — a system formerly in use for identifying persons, esp criminals, by means of a detailed record of physical characteristics
  • beryllium copper — a copper alloy containing a small amount of beryllium and often some nickel or cobalt, having high strength, hardness, and electrical conductivity.
  • bessemer process — (formerly) a process for producing steel by blowing air through molten pig iron at about 1250°C in a Bessemer converter: silicon, manganese, and phosphorus impurities are removed and the carbon content is controlled
  • best-before date — a date on packaged food indicating how long it is safe to keep it
  • beta abstraction — [lambda-calculus] The conversion of an expression to an application of a lambda abstraction to an argument expression. Some subterm of the original expression becomes the argument of the abstraction and the rest becomes its body. E.g. 4+1 --> (\ x . x+1) 4 The opposite of beta abstraction is beta reduction. These are the two kinds of beta conversion.
  • bidirectionality — capable of reacting or functioning in two, usually opposite, directions.
  • bihar and orissa — a former province of NE India: now divided into the states of Bihar and Odisha (formerly Orissa).
  • billy goat beard — a man's beard that is long under the chin and shaved elsewhere
  • binary operation — a mathematical operation in which two elements are combined to yield a single result: Addition and multiplication are binary operations on the set of real numbers.
  • binocular fusion — fusion (def 5a).
  • binocular-fusion — the act or process of fusing; the state of being fused.
  • binomial theorem — a mathematical theorem that gives the expansion of any binomial raised to a positive integral power, n. It contains n + 1 terms: (x + a)n = xn + nxn–1a + [n(n–1)/2] xn–2a2 +…+ (nk) xn–kak + … + an, where (nk) = n!/(n–k)!k!, the number of combinations of k items selected from n
  • biodegradability — capable of decaying through the action of living organisms: biodegradable paper; biodegradable detergent.
  • biodeterioration — biodegradation.
  • bioenvironmental — pertaining to the environment of living organisms: Bioenvironmental engineers seek to reduce air and water pollution.
  • biofortification — the process of breeding staple crops to have higher levels of essential nutrients, either through selective breeding or genetic modification: iron biofortification of rice; biofortification of wheat with zinc.
  • biometeorologist — the scientific study of the effects of natural or artificial atmospheric conditions, as temperature and humidity, on living organisms.
  • biometric device — biometrics
  • bipolar disorder — Bipolar disorder is a mental illness in which a person's state of mind changes between extreme happiness and extreme depression.
  • bird of ill omen — a person who brings bad news.
  • bird of paradise — A bird of paradise is a songbird which is found mainly in New Guinea. The male birds have very brightly coloured feathers.
  • bird's-nest soup — a rich spicy Chinese soup made from the outer part of the nests of SE Asian swifts of the genus Collocalia
  • bird-of-paradise — Also called bird-of-paradise flower. any of several plants of the genus Strelitzia, native to southern Africa, especially S. reginae, having a large, showy orange and blue inflorescence.
  • birthday honours — (in Britain) honorary titles conferred on the official birthday of the sovereign
  • birthwort family — the plant family Aristolochiaceae, typified by mostly tropical woody vines and herbaceous plants, having alternate, heart-shaped leaves and flowers lacking true petals but having three petallike sepals, and including the birthwort, Dutchman's-pipe, and wild ginger.
  • bite your tongue — either of the two fleshy parts or folds forming the margins of the mouth and functioning in speech.
  • bitterroot range — range of the Rocky Mountains, along the Ida.-Mont. border: highest peak, c. 11,000 ft (3,353 m)
  • bitterroot river — a river in SW Montana, flowing N to the Clark Fork River. 120 miles (193 km) long.
  • black chokeberry — See under chokeberry (def 1).
  • black propaganda — propaganda that does not come from the source it claims to come from
  • black woodpecker — a large woodpecker, Dryocopus martius, found in parts of Eurasia and Africa
  • bleaching powder — a white powder with the odour of chlorine, consisting of chlorinated calcium hydroxide with an approximate formula CaCl(OCl).4H2O. It is used in solution as a bleaching agent and disinfectant
  • bleeder resistor — a resistor connected across the output terminals of a power supply in order to improve voltage regulation and to discharge filter capacitors
  • blink comparator — an optical instrument used to detect small differences in two photographs of the same field or object by viewing them alternately, switching rapidly from one to the other.
  • block-structured — (language)   Any programming language in which sections of source code contained within pairs of matching delimiters such as "" and "" (e.g. in C) or "begin" and "end" (e.g. Algol) are executed as a single unit. A block of code may be the body of a subroutine or function, or it may be controlled by conditional execution (if statement) or repeated execution (while statement, for statement, etc.). In all but the most primitive block structured languages a variable's scope can be limited to the block in which it is declared. Block-structured languages support structured programming where each block can be written without detailed knowledge of the inner workings of other blocks, thus allowing a top-down design approach. See also abstract data type, module.
  • blocked currency — a currency that is not freely convertible because of exchange controls imposed on it
  • bloomsbury group — a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals living and working in and around Bloomsbury in London from about 1907 to 1930. Influenced by the philosophy of G. E. Moore, they included Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and John Maynard Keynes
  • blow one's cover — to be or serve as a covering for; extend over; rest on the surface of: Snow covered the fields.
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