16-letter words containing o, s, t, e
- atmospheric tide — a movement of atmospheric masses caused by the gravitational attraction of the sun and moon and by daily solar heating.
- atomic structure — the concept of an atom as a central positively charged nucleus consisting of protons and neutrons surrounded by a number of electrons. The number of electrons is equal to the number of protons: the whole entity is thus electrically neutral
- atwood's machine — a device consisting of two unequal masses connected by a string passed over a pulley, used to illustrate the laws of motion.
- auditory vesicle — the pouch that is formed by the invagination of an ectodermal placode and that develops into the internal ear.
- australopithecus — an extinct genus of small-brained,large-toothed bipedal hominids that lived in Africa between one and four million years ago.
- autofluorescence — (biology, microscopy) Self-induced fluorescence.
- autoregressively — In an autoregressive manner.
- autostereoscopic — Of or pertaining to autostereoscopy.
- autotransformers — Plural form of autotransformer.
- aversion therapy — a method of suppressing an undesirable habit, such as excessive smoking, by causing the subject to associate an unpleasant effect, such as an electric shock or nausea, with the habit
- axis of symmetry — Mathematics. a straight line for which every point on a given curve has corresponding to it another point such that the line connecting the two points is bisected by the given line.
- bachelor of arts — a degree conferred on a person who has successfully completed his or her undergraduate studies, usually in a branch of the liberal arts or humanities
- bachelor-at-arms — bachelor (def 4).
- ballast resistor — ballast (def 5a).
- ballast-resistor — Nautical. any heavy material carried temporarily or permanently in a vessel to provide desired draft and stability.
- barbecue stopper — a controversial current-affairs issue
- baron tweedsmuir — the title of Scottish novelist John Buchan
- bartholomeu dias — Bartholomeu [bahr-too-loo-me-oo] /ˌbɑr tʊ lʊˈmɛ ʊ/ (Show IPA), c1450–1500, Portuguese navigator: discoverer of the Cape of Good Hope.
- basal metabolism — the amount of energy required by an individual in the resting state, for such functions as breathing and circulation of the blood
- basement complex — the undifferentiated assemblage of rock (basement rock) underlying the oldest stratified rocks in any region: usually crystalline, metamorphosed, and mostly, but not necessarily, Precambrian in age.
- basic dichromate — an orange-red, amorphous, water-insoluble powder, Bi 2 O 3 ⋅2CrO 3 , used chiefly as a pigment in paints.
- batch processing — manufacturing products or treating materials in batches, by passing the output of one process to subsequent processes
- bbn technologies — (company) A company, originally known as Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN), based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. BBN were awarded the original contract to build the ARPANET and have been extensively involved in Internet development. They are responsible for managing NNSC, CSNET, and NEARnet. The language LOGO was developed at BBN, as was the BBN Butterfly supercomputer.
- be as good as to — would you please
- be of assistance — Someone or something that is of assistance to you is helpful or useful to you.
- bed-sitting room — a combined bedroom and sitting room serving as a one-room apartment
- beefsteak tomato — a very large fleshy variety of tomato
- beg the question — If you say that something begs a particular question, you mean that it makes people want to ask that question; some people consider that this use is incorrect.
- benito mussolini — Benito [buh-nee-toh;; Italian be-nee-taw] /bəˈni toʊ;; Italian bɛˈni tɔ/ (Show IPA), (I"Il Duce") 1883–1945, Italian Fascist leader: premier of Italy 1922–43.
- benoit samuelson — Joan (Joan Benoit) born 1957, U.S. distance runner: first Olympic marathon women's winner, 1984.
- benzoate of soda — sodium benzoate
- bertillon system — a system formerly in use for identifying persons, esp criminals, by means of a detailed record of physical characteristics
- beside the point — If you say that something is beside the point, you mean that it is not relevant to the subject that you are discussing.
- 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.
- binet-simon test — an intelligence test that consists of questions, problems, and things to do, graded in terms of mental age
- biometeorologist — the scientific study of the effects of natural or artificial atmospheric conditions, as temperature and humidity, on living organisms.
- 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
- bite one's nails — to chew off the ends of one's fingernails
- bleeder resistor — a resistor connected across the output terminals of a power supply in order to improve voltage regulation and to discharge filter capacitors
- 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.
- blood substitute — a substance such as plasma, albumin, or dextran, used to replace lost blood or increase the blood volume
- blow one's stack — to lose one's temper; fly into a rage
- blow the whistle — to inform (on)
- boatswain's mate — a job classification in the US navy
- boatswain's pipe — a whistle used formerly to give orders on board ship
- bonneville flats — an area of salt flats in the W part of Great Salt Lake Desert, in NW Utah: site of automobile speed tests.
- bootstrap loader — (operating system) A short program loaded from non-volatile storage and used to bootstrap a computer. On early computers great efforts were expended on making the bootstrap loader short, in order to make it easy to toggle in via the front panel switches. It was just clever enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from punched cards or paper tape), to which it handed control. This program in turn read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer "pulled itself up by its bootstraps" to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap loader is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the "boot block". When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it. A diskless workstation can use bootp to load its OS from the network.
- bootstrap memory — memory that allows new programs to be entered because some simple preliminary instructions or information are already built in.
- border leicester — a breed of sheep originally developed in the border country between Scotland and England by crossing English Leicesters with Cheviots: large numbers in Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand. It has a long white fleece with no wool on the head