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19-letter words containing o, r

  • barbados gooseberry — Also called lemon vine. a treelike cactus, Pereskia aculeata, of tropical America, characterized by broad, elliptical leaves and spiny stems bearing a yellow, edible fruit.
  • bargaining position — the position of a person, group, or organization in a negotiation, with respect to their ability to achieve a deal which is favourable to themselves
  • barometric gradient — pressure gradient
  • barometric pressure — atmospheric pressure as indicated by a barometer
  • barrack-room lawyer — a person who freely offers opinions, esp in legal matters, that he or she is unqualified to give
  • battle-ground state — a state of the U.S. in which the Democratic and Republican candidates both have a good chance of winning and that is considered key to the outcome of a presidential election: the swing states of Ohio and Indiana.
  • battles of bull run — two battles fought at Manassas Junction near a stream named Bull Run, during the American Civil War (July, 1861 and August, 1862), in both of which the Federal army was routed by the Confederates
  • baudotbetical order — (algorithm)   /baw do bet' i k*l/ Sorted into an order where numerics and special characters are intermixed by sorting a 5-bit Baudot code file ignoring the numeric shift and unshift codes.
  • bbc networking club — (body)   A bulletin board run by the British Broadcasting Corporation Education department from April 1994 to 30 Nov 1995.
  • be burnt to a crisp — If something is burnt to a crisp, it is completely burnt.
  • be greek to someone — to be incomprehensible or unintelligible to someone
  • be one's own master — If you say that you are your own master, you mean that your decisions are not controlled by other people and you are free to do what you want.
  • be one's own person — a human being, whether an adult or child: The table seats four persons.
  • be someone's junior — to be younger than someone
  • beauty preparations — the cosmetics, creams etc used to improve someone's beauty
  • beggar-my-neighbour — a card game in which one player tries to win all the cards of the other player
  • beginning inventory — A beginning inventory is all of the goods, services, or materials that a business has available for use or sale at the start of a new accounting period.
  • behavioral genetics — an interdisciplinary field studying the effects of genetics and hereditary factors on animal and human behavior.
  • behavioral medicine — an interdisciplinary field that uses the concepts and techniques of the behavioral sciences to improve physical and emotional health.
  • behavioural science — the application of scientific methods to the study of the behaviour of organisms
  • behind closed doors — If people have talks and discussions behind closed doors, they have them in private because they want them to be kept secret.
  • bellybutton surgery — laparoscopy.
  • below par/under par — If you feel below par or under par, you feel tired and unable to perform as well as you normally do.
  • bend over backwards — to make a special effort, esp in order to please
  • benefit performance — a theatrical or musical performance in aid of charity
  • bernoulli principle — (Or "air foil principle", after Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli, 1700-1782) The law that pressure in a fluid decreases with the rate of flow. It has been applied to a class of hard disk drives. See Bernoulli Box.
  • bernoulli's theorem — Statistics. law of averages (def 1).
  • bernstein condition — (parallel)   Processes cannot execute in parallel if one effects values used by the other. Nor can they execute in parallel if any subsequent process uses data effected by both, i.e. whose value might depend on the order of execution.
  • 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.
  • bill of particulars — an itemized statement of claims or counterclaims provided to the opposing party of a lawsuit
  • 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.
  • binding arbitration — dispute resolution
  • binocular disparity — the small differences in the positions of the parts of the images falling on each eye that results when each eye views the scene from a slightly different position; these differences make stereoscopic vision possible
  • 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
  • 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 forest gateau — a chocolate sponge cake containing morello cherries and whipped cream, with a topping of chocolate icing
  • black warrior river — a river in N central Alabama, flowing SW past Birmingham to the Tombigbee River. 178 miles (286 km) long.
  • black-footed ferret — a musteline mammal, Mustela nigripes, of W North America, closely related to the weasels
  • blackbelly rosefish — a reddish scorpionfish, Helicolenus dactylopterus, inhabiting the deep waters of the western Atlantic Ocean.
  • blackfellow's bread — the edible portion of a species of pore fungus, Polyporus mylittae, that occurs in Australia.
  • 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.
  • blind carbon (copy) — a carbon copy of a letter sent to someone other than the addressee, with no indication on the original letter that such a copy has been sent
  • blood pressure cuff — A blood pressure cuff is a medical device consisting of a piece of rubber or similar material that is wrapped around a patient's arm and then inflated in order to measure their blood pressure.
  • 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
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