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18-letter words containing o, s, b, r

  • board of governors — a group of people who oversee the running of a school
  • bore the pants off — to bore extremely
  • 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
  • boulogne-sur-seine — an industrial suburb of SW Paris. Pop: 106 367 (1999)
  • bounty-fed farmers — farmers who benefit from subsidies
  • 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.
  • brazilian rosewood — a Brazilian tree, Dalbergia nigra, of the legume family.
  • 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
  • broadcasting house — any of a number of buildings in the UK from which the BBC broadcasts or has broadcast
  • bronchocandidiasis — See under candidiasis.
  • brothers karamazov — a novel (1880) by Dostoevsky.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • cabernet sauvignon — a black grape originally grown in the Bordeaux area of France, and now throughout the wine-producing world
  • california rosebay — a Pacific coast shrub or tree (Rhododendron californicum) of the heath family, with rosy or purplish flowers
  • cambrian mountains — a mountain range in Wales, extending from Carmarthenshire in the S to Denbighshire in the N. Highest peak: Aran Fawddwy, 891 m (2970 ft)
  • cape breton island — an island off SE Canada, in NE Nova Scotia, separated from the mainland by the Strait of Canso: its easternmost point is Cape Breton. Pop: 132 298 (2006). Area: 10 280 sq km (3970 sq miles)
  • carbonic anhydrase — an enzyme in blood cells that catalyses the decomposition of carbonic acid into carbon dioxide and water, facilitating the transport of carbon dioxide from the tissues to the lungs
  • carisbrooke castle — a castle near Newport on the Isle of Wight: Charles I was held prisoner here from 1647 until his execution in 1649
  • catch one's breath — When you catch your breath while you are doing something energetic, you stop for a short time so that you can start breathing normally again.
  • chamber of horrors — a room, for example in a waxworks, containing objects, images or representations of people or scenes that are believed likely to frighten or horrify visitors
  • chinese gooseberry — kiwi (sense 2)
  • christian brothers — a religious congregation of laymen founded in France in 1684 for the education of the poor
  • chronic bronchitis — persistent respiratory disease
  • claustrophobically — In a claustrophobic way.
  • comb-footed spider — any of numerous spiders constituting the family Theridiidae, having a comblike row of bristles on the tarsi of the hind legs.
  • combination square — an adjustable device for carpenters, used as a try square, miter square, level, etc.
  • combustion chamber — an enclosed space in which combustion takes place, such as the space above the piston in the cylinder head of an internal-combustion engine or the chambers in a gas turbine or rocket engine in which fuel and oxidant burn
  • combustion furnace — a furnace used in the laboratory to carry out elemental analysis of organic compounds
  • complementary base — either of the nucleotide bases linked by a hydrogen bond on opposite strands of DNA or double-stranded RNA: guanine is the complementary base of cytosine, and adenine is the complementary base of thymine in DNA and of uracil in RNA.
  • composition rubber — manufactured rubber
  • comprehensibleness — The quality of being comprehensible; comprehensibility.
  • connected subgraph — (mathematics)   A connected graph consisting of a subset of the nodes and edges of some other graph.
  • cool as a cucumber — very calm; self-possessed
  • corpus christi bay — a bay in S Texas, at the mouth of the Nueces River.
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