16-letter words containing o, y
- not by any means — in no way, by no method
- not on your life — the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally.
- nucleophilically — In a nucleophilic manner.
- observationality — The property of being observational.
- occupation layer — (on an archaeological site) a layer of remains left by a single culture, from which the culture can be dated or identified.
- ocellated turkey — a wild turkey, Agriocharis ocellata, of Yucatán, Belize, and Guatemala, typically having green, blue, reddish-brown, and yellowish-brown plumage of a metallic luster and eyelike spots on the tail.
- off off broadway — experimental or avant-garde drama produced in New York City, in small theaters, halls, churches, etc.
- off-by-one error — (programming) (Or "Obi-Wan error") An exceedingly common error induced in many ways, such as by starting at zero when you should have started at one or vice-versa, or by writing "< N" instead of "<= N" or vice-versa. Often confounded with fencepost error, which is properly a particular subtype of it. The term zeroth corrects the linguistic off-by-one error of, e.g., referring to the "1st" element of an array whose indexes start from zero.
- off-off-broadway — experimental or avant-garde drama produced in New York City, in small theaters, halls, churches, etc.
- old world monkey — any of various anthropoid primates of the family Cercopithecidae, of Africa, the Arabian peninsula, and Asia, typically having a hairless face, forward- or downward-directed nostrils, relatively short arms, flat nails, and either having a rudimentary tail or using the tail for balance rather than grasping, and including the baboon, colobus monkey, guenon, langur, macaque, mandrill, mangabey, patas, proboscis, and talapoin.
- on your doorstep — If a place is on your doorstep, it is very near to where you live. If something happens on your doorstep, it happens very close to where you live.
- one's salad days — If you refer to your salad days, you are referring to a period of your life when you were young and inexperienced.
- one-party system — a political system in which only one party is allowed
- one-way function — (cryptography, mathematics) A function which is easy to compute but whose inverse is very difficult to compute. Such functions have important applications in cryptography, specifically in public-key cryptography. See also: trapdoor function.
- oneida community — a society of religious perfectionists established by John Humphrey Noyes, in 1848 at Oneida, N.Y., on the theory that sin can be eliminated through social reform: dissolved and reorganized in 1881 as a joint-stock company.
- onomatopoeically — the formation of a word, as cuckoo, meow, honk, or boom, by imitation of a sound made by or associated with its referent.
- opening ceremony — a ceremony held in celebration of the start of something
- operating system — (operating system) (OS) The low-level software which handles the interface to peripheral hardware, schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user when no application program is running. The OS may be split into a kernel which is always present and various system programs which use facilities provided by the kernel to perform higher-level house-keeping tasks, often acting as servers in a client-server relationship. Some would include a graphical user interface and window system as part of the OS, others would not. The operating system loader, BIOS, or other firmware required at boot time or when installing the operating system would generally not be considered part of the operating system, though this distinction is unclear in the case of a rommable operating system such as RISC OS. The facilities an operating system provides and its general design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up around the machines on which it runs. Example operating systems include 386BSD, AIX, AOS, Amoeba, Angel, Artemis microkernel, BeOS, Brazil, COS, CP/M, CTSS, Chorus, DACNOS, DOSEXEC 2, GCOS, GEORGE 3, GEOS, ITS, KAOS, Linux, LynxOS, MPV, MS-DOS, MVS, Mach, Macintosh operating system, Microsoft Windows, MINIX, Multics, Multipop-68, Novell NetWare, OS-9, OS/2, Pick, Plan 9, QNX, RISC OS, STING, System V, System/360, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, TRUSIX, TWENEX, TYMCOM-X, Thoth, Unix, VM/CMS, VMS, VRTX, VSTa, VxWorks, WAITS.
- operating-system — the collection of software that directs a computer's operations, controlling and scheduling the execution of other programs, and managing storage, input/output, and communication resources. Abbreviation: OS.
- opportunity cost — the money or other benefits lost when pursuing a particular course of action instead of a mutually-exclusive alternative: The company cannot afford the opportunity cost attached to policy decisions made by the current CEO.
- opportunity shop — a shop selling second-hand goods for charitable funds
- opposed-cylinder — (of an internal-combustion engine) having cylinders on opposite sides of the crankcase in the same plane
- optical activity — the ability of a substance to rotate the plane of polarization of plane-polarized light.
- orange men's day — July 12, an annual celebration in Northern Ireland and certain cities having a large Irish section, especially Liverpool, to mark both the victory of William III over James II at the Battle of the Boyne, July 1, 1690, and the Battle of Augbrim, July 12, 1690.
- orbital velocity — the minimum velocity at which a body must move to maintain a given orbit.
- order of the day — the agenda for an assembly, meeting, group, or organization.
- ordinary jubilee — the celebration of any of certain anniversaries, as the twenty-fifth (silver jubilee) fiftieth (golden jubilee) or sixtieth or seventy-fifth (diamond jubilee)
- ordnance factory — a factory that makes military weapons and ammunition
- organizationally — the act or process of organizing.
- organoleptically — In an organoleptic manner.
- ornithologically — In terms of ornithology.
- orthodoxy sunday — a solemn festival held on the first Sunday of Lent (Orthodoxy Sunday) commemorating the restoration of the use of icons in the church (a.d. 842) and the triumph over all heresies.
- orthographically — In an orthographical manner; using proper spelling, capitalization and grammar.
- orthosympathetic — Of or pertaining to the sympathetic component of the autonomic nervous system.
- osteoarchaeology — the branch of archaeology that deals with the study of bones found at archaeological sites
- otolaryngologist — Otorhinolaryngologist.
- out of the money — If an investment is out of the money, it would be a loss if it was sold.
- out of your mind — If you say that someone is out of their mind, you mean that they are mad or very foolish.
- over-familiarity — thorough knowledge or mastery of a thing, subject, etc.
- overall majority — If a political party wins an overall majority in an election or vote, they get more votes than the total number of votes or seats won by all their opponents.
- overcompensatory — a pronounced striving to neutralize and conceal a strong but unacceptable character trait by substituting for it an opposite trait.
- overdramatically — In an overdramatic manner.
- overexcitability — to excite too much.
- overhead railway — elevated railroad.
- ovshinsky effect — an effect that turns special types of glassy, thin films into semiconductors upon application of low voltage.
- oxycalcium light — calcium light.
- paleoclimatology — the branch of paleogeography dealing with the study of paleoclimates.
- paraformaldehyde — a white, crystalline polymer of formaldehyde, (HCOH) n , from which it is obtained by evaporation of the aqueous solution: used chiefly as an antiseptic.
- parity operation — the mathematical operation of reversing the directions of all three space coordinates. Symbol: P.
- part way through — mid-way; before the end