18-letter words containing o, r, b
- bloodbrain barrier — a layer of tightly packed cells that make up the walls of brain capillaries and prevent substances in the blood from diffusing freely into the brain: passage across the cell membranes is determined by solubility in the lipid bilayer or recognition by a transport molecule.
- blue-collar worker — a manual industrial worker
- board of directors — A company's board of directors is the group of people elected by its shareholders to manage the company.
- board of education — a group or agency with responsibility for education
- board of elections — a bipartisan board appointed usually by local authorities and charged with control of elections and voting procedure.
- board of examiners — a group of people who officially administer examinations
- board of governors — a group of people who oversee the running of a school
- bolt from the blue — If a piece of news comes like a bolt from the blue, it is completely unexpected and very surprising.
- 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
- borosilicate glass — any of a range of heat- and chemical-resistant glasses, such as Pyrex, prepared by fusing together boron(III) oxide, silicon dioxide, and, usually, a metal oxide
- bosnia-herzegovina — a country in SE Europe; a constituent republic of Yugoslavia until 1991; in a state of civil war (1992–95); Serbian and Croatian forces were also involved: mostly barren and mountainous, with forests in the east. Languages: Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian (formerly all regarded together as Serbo-Croat). Religion: Muslim, Serbian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic. Currency: marka (pegged to the euro). Capital: Sarajevo. Pop: 3 875 723 (2013 est). Area: 51 129 sq km (19 737 sq miles)
- boston brown bread — a dark, sweetened, steamed bread made of cornmeal, rye or wheat flour, etc., and molasses
- bottom dead center — Bottom dead center is the point at which the piston of an engine is nearest to the axis of the crankshaft. On a vertical engine, this is the lowest point that the piston reaches.
- bottom dead centre — the position of the crank of a reciprocating engine when the piston is at its nearest point to the crankshaft
- boulogne-sur-seine — an industrial suburb of SW Paris. Pop: 106 367 (1999)
- boundary condition — a stated restriction, usually in the form of an equation, that limits the possible solutions to a differential equation.
- bounty-fed farmers — farmers who benefit from subsidies
- bourdon-tube gauge — an instrument for measuring the pressure of gases or liquids, consisting of a semicircular or coiled, flexible metal tube attached to a gauge that records the degree to which the tube is straightened by the pressure of the gas or liquid inside.
- 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
- brand-name product — A brand-name product is one which is made by a well-known manufacturer and has the manufacturer's label on it.
- brazilian rosewood — a Brazilian tree, Dalbergia nigra, of the legume family.
- breach of contract — the act of breaking the conditions of a contract
- breach of security — an act that violates a country, area, or building's security measures
- break your silence — If someone breaks their silence about something, they talk about something that they have not talked about before or for a long time.
- 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
- bring someone luck — If you say that something brings bad luck or brings someone good luck, you believe that it has an influence on whether good or bad things happen to them.
- bring to its knees — If a country or organization is brought to its knees, it is almost completely destroyed by someone or something.
- briquet's syndrome — somatization disorder.
- 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
- broad-leaved maple — a maple, Acer macrophyllum, of western North America, characterized by dark green, thickened leaves that may reach 12 inches (30 cm) or more in width.
- broadcasting house — any of a number of buildings in the UK from which the BBC broadcasts or has broadcast
- broken twill weave — a twill weave in which the direction of the diagonal produced by the weft threads is reversed after no more than two passages of the weft.
- bromochloromethane — chlorobromomethane.
- bronchocandidiasis — See under candidiasis.
- brothers karamazov — a novel (1880) by Dostoevsky.
- brute force attack — (cryptography) A method of breaking a cipher (that is, to decrypt a specific encrypted text) by trying every possible key. The quicker the brute force attack, the weaker the cipher. Feasibility of brute force attack depends on the key length of the cipher, and on the amount of computational power available to the attacker. Brute force attack is impossible against the ciphers with variable-size key, such as a one-time pad cipher.
- 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.
- burkitt's lymphoma — a cancer characterized by tumors containing lymphoid cells, occurring esp. in children, in the jaw, eyes, and internal organs: it is associated with the Epstein-Barr virus
- burn one's bridges — If you burn your bridges, you do something which forces you to continue with a particular course of action, and makes it impossible for you to return to an earlier situation or relationship.
- burn one's fingers — to suffer from having meddled or been rash
- burrell collection — a gallery in Glasgow, noted for its collection of paintings, textiles, furniture, ceramics, etc
- bursa of fabricius — a lymphoid gland of the cloaca in birds, believed to function in disease resistance, and closing or disappearing as the bird ages.
- butler's sideboard — a sideboard, often with a fall front, having on its top a china cabinet with glazed doors.
- byte-code compiler — (programming, tool) A compiler which outputs a program in some kind of byte-code. Compare: byte-code interpreter.