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16-letter words containing o, s

  • azuero peninsula — a peninsula in SW Panama, bordered on the E by the Gulf of Panama.
  • 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).
  • background music — music of any kind that is played while some other activity is going on, so that people do not actively attend to it
  • background noise — any type of noise that is not the sound that you are specifically listening to or monitoring
  • backus-naur form — (language, grammar)   (BNF, originally "Backus Normal Form") A formal metasyntax used to express context-free grammars. Backus Normal Form was renamed Backus-Naur Form at the suggestion of Donald Knuth. BNF is one of the most commonly used metasyntactic notations for specifying the syntax of programming languages, command sets, and the like. It is widely used for language descriptions but seldom documented anywhere (how do you document a metasyntax?), so that it must usually be learned by osmosis (but see RFC 2234). Consider this BNF for a US postal address: ::= ::= | "." ::= [] | ::= [] ::= "," This translates into English as: "A postal-address consists of a name-part, followed by a street-address part, followed by a zip-code part. A personal-part consists of either a first name or an initial followed by a dot. A name-part consists of either: a personal-part followed by a last name followed by an optional "jr-part" (Jr., Sr., or dynastic number) and end-of-line, or a personal part followed by a name part (this rule illustrates the use of recursion in BNFs, covering the case of people who use multiple first and middle names and/or initials). A street address consists of an optional apartment specifier, followed by a street number, followed by a street name. A zip-part consists of a town-name, followed by a comma, followed by a state code, followed by a ZIP-code followed by an end-of-line." Note that many things (such as the format of a personal-part, apartment specifier, or ZIP-code) are left unspecified. These lexical details are presumed to be obvious from context or specified somewhere nearby. There are many variants and extensions of BNF, possibly containing some or all of the regexp wild cards such as "*" or "+". EBNF is a common one. In fact the example above isn't the pure form invented for the ALGOL 60 report. "[]" was introduced a few years later in IBM's PL/I definition but is now universally recognised. ABNF is another extension.
  • bahasa indonesia — the official language of Indonesia: developed from the form of Malay formerly widely used as a trade language in SE Asia
  • balkan mountains — a mountain range extending across Bulgaria from the Black Sea to the eastern border. Highest peak: Mount Botev, 2376 m (7793 ft)
  • 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
  • bargaining scope — the range of topics within the scope of a particular set of negotiations leading to a collective agreement
  • baron tweedsmuir — the title of Scottish novelist John Buchan
  • barrier of ideas — the representations of objects which certain accounts of perception interpose between the objects themselves and our awareness of them, so that, as critics argue, we can never know whether there is in reality anything which resembles our perceptions
  • 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.
  • basic vocabulary — the set of lexical items in a language that are most resistant to replacement, referring to the most common and universal elements of human experience, such as parts of the body (foot, eye), universal features of the environment (water, star), common activities (eat, sleep), and the lowest numerals.
  • basque provinces — an autonomous region of N Spain, comprising the provinces of Álava, Guipúzcoa, and Vizcaya: inhabited mainly by Basques, who retained virtual autonomy from the 9th to the 19th century. Pop: 1 840 700 (2003 est). Area: about 7250 sq km (2800 sq miles)
  • bastard mahogany — an Australian tree, Eucalyptus botryoides, of the myrtle family, having lance-shaped leaves and furrowed bark.
  • bastard pointing — an imitation of tuck pointing, having a fillet made from the mortar of the joint.
  • bastard toadflax — any of several low-growing, often parasitic plants of the genus Comandra, having alternate leaves and clusters of small whitish flowers.
  • 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 in one's cups — If someone is in their cups, they are drunk.
  • be in sb's shoes — If you talk about being in someone's shoes, you talk about what you would do or how you would feel if you were in their situation.
  • be of assistance — Someone or something that is of assistance to you is helpful or useful to you.
  • be one's own man — to be independent or free
  • bear one's cross — a structure consisting essentially of an upright and a transverse piece, used to execute persons in ancient times.
  • 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.
  • behavioural sink — a small area in which people or animals live in overcrowded conditions
  • belgian malinois — one of a Belgian breed of medium-sized dogs having a short coat, tan to dark brown in color, a black mask, and erect ears, bred originally as a sheepherding dog.
  • belgian sheepdog — any of a Belgian breed of large herding dog with a black coat, sometimes used as a guide dog
  • bells of ireland — an annual garden plant, Moluccella laevis, whose flowers have a green cup-shaped calyx: family Lamiaceae (labiates)
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • bicapitalisation — The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as PostScript, NeXT, NeWS, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalisation. Too many marketroid types think this sort of thing is really cute, even the 2,317th time they do it. Compare studlycaps.
  • big bag of pages — (BIBOP) Where data objects are tagged with some kind of descriptor (giving their size or type for example) memory can be saved by storing objects with the same descriptor in one "page" of memory. The most significant bits of an object's address are used as the BIBOP page number. This is looked up in a BIBOP table to find the descriptor for all objects in that page. This idea is similar to the "zones" used in some Lisp systems (e.g. LeLisp).
  • bihar and orissa — a former province of NE India: now divided into the states of Bihar and Odisha (formerly Orissa).
  • binet-simon test — an intelligence test that consists of questions, problems, and things to do, graded in terms of mental age
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