14-letter words containing p, l, i
- autopilot code — (jargon, humour) Code that was written by a programmer on "auto-pilot" who wasn't really thinking about what they were doing.
- autopolyploidy — having more than two haploid sets of chromosomes that are derived from the same ancestral species.
- autotetraploid — an individual or strain whose chromosome complement consists of four copies of a single genome due to doubling of an ancestral chromosome complement
- avoidance play — a play by the declarer designed to prevent a particular opponent from taking the lead.
- back-pedalling — a retreat from or a retraction of a previously held view
- backflap hinge — Building Trades. flap (def 20a).
- balance spring — hairspring.
- ballet slipper — a heelless cloth or leather slipper worn by ballet dancers.
- baltimore chop — a batted ball that takes a high bounce upon hitting the ground on or immediately in front of home plate, often enabling the batter to reach first base safely.
- baptismal font — a large bowl for baptismal water, usually mounted on a pedestal
- baptismal name — Christian name (def 1).
- baptismal vows — the solemn promises made during baptism, either by the person baptized or by his or her sponsors
- bathygraphical — (of a maps) representing the contours of the seabed
- be in the loop — If someone is in the loop, they are part of a group of people who make decisions about important things, or they know about these decisions. If they are out of the loop, they do not make or know about important decisions.
- beveridge plan — the plan for comprehensive social insurance, proposed by Sir William Beveridge in Great Britain in 1941.
- bible-thumping — an evangelist or other person who quotes the Bible frequently, especially as a means of exhortation or rebuke.
- bicuspid valve — mitral valve
- bipolarisation — the act of bipolarising
- bipolarization — the action of rendering something bipolar
- bishops' bible — an English translation of the Bible made under the direction of Matthew Parker and published in 1568: the recognized translation of the Bible in England until the Authorized (King James) Version of 1611.
- bite one's lip — If you bite your lip or your tongue, you stop yourself from saying something that you want to say, because it would be the wrong thing to say in the circumstances.
- bitmap display — (hardware) A computer output device where each pixel displayed on the monitor screen corresponds directly to one or more bits in the computer's video memory. Such a display can be updated extremely rapidly since changing a pixel involves only a single processor write to memory compared with a terminal or VDU connected via a serial line where the speed of the serial line limits the speed at which the display can be changed. Most modern personal computers and workstations have bitmap displays, allowing the efficient use of graphical user interfaces, interactive graphics and a choice of on-screen fonts. Some more expensive systems still delegate graphics operations to dedicated hardware such as graphics accelerators. The bitmap display might be traced back to the earliest days of computing when the Manchester University Mark I(?) computer, developed by F.C. Williams and T. Kilburn shortly after the Second World War. This used a storage tube as its working memory. Phosphor dots were used to store single bits of data which could be read by the user and interpreted as binary numbers.
- bits per pixel — (hardware, graphics) (bpp) The number of bits of information stored per pixel of an image or displayed by a graphics adapter. The more bits there are, the more colours can be represented, but the more memory is required to store or display the image. A colour can be described by the intensities of red, green and blue (RGB) components. Allowing 8 bits (1 byte) per component (24 bits per pixel) gives 256 levels for each component and over 16 million different colours - more than the human eye can distinguish. Microsoft Windows [and others?] calls this truecolour. An image of 1024x768 with 24 bpp requires over 2 MB of memory. "High colour" uses 16 bpp (or 15 bpp), 5 bits for blue, 5 bits for red and 6 bits for green. This reduced colour precision gives a slight loss of image quality at a 1/3 saving on memory. Standard VGA uses a palette of 16 colours (4 bpp), each colour in the palette is 24 bit. Standard SVGA uses a palette of 256 colours (8 bpp). Some graphics hardware and software support 32-bit colour depths, including an 8-bit "alpha channel" for transparency effects.
- black skipjack — a small spotted tuna, Euthynnus yaito, of Indo-Pacific seas
- blacktip shark — a widely distributed sand shark, Charcharinus limbatus, having fins that appear to have been dipped in ink, inhabiting shallow waters of warm seas.
- blaxploitation — a genre of films featuring Black stereotypes
- blind stamping — an impression on a book cover without using colour or gold leaf
- blister copper — an impure form of copper having a blister-like surface due to the release of gas during cooling
- blister-packed — presented in a blister pack
- block capitals — Block capitals are simple capital letters that are not decorated in any way.
- block printing — printing from hand engraved or carved blocks of wood or linoleum
- block sampling — the selection of a corpus for statistical literary analysis by random selection of a starting point and consideration of the continuous passage following it
- blood grouping — the ascertainment of a person's blood group
- blood spinning — a medical treatment, a use for which is the healing of sports-related injuries, that involves removing the platelet cells from the patient’s blood sample then injecting them into the injured area in order to speed recovery
- blotting paper — Blotting paper is thick soft paper that you use for soaking up and drying ink on a piece of paper.
- bomb explosion — an explosion caused by the detonation of a bomb
- bone porcelain — bone china.
- bottling plant — a factory where drinks are bottled
- bottomless pit — If you describe a supply of something as bottomless, you mean that it seems so large that it will never run out.
- bouillon spoon — a spoon with a round bowl, smaller than a soup spoon.
- brachycephalic — having a head nearly as broad from side to side as from front to back, esp one with a cephalic index over 80
- bread poultice — a poultice made from breadcrumbs
- breast implant — an object such as a sachet filled with gel introduced surgically into a woman's breast to enlarge it
- bubonic plague — Bubonic plague is a serious infectious disease spread by rats. It killed many people during the Middle Ages.
- bug-compatible — Said of a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with fossils or misfeatures in other programs or (especially) previous releases of itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used \ as a path separator to be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice of / as an option character in 1.0."
- building paper — any of various types of heavy-duty paper that usually consist of bitumen reinforced with fibre sandwiched between two sheets of kraft paper: used in damp-proofing or as insulation between the soil and a road surface
- business reply — a form of mail, as a postcard, letter, or envelope, usually sent as an enclosure, and which can be mailed back by respondents without their having to pay postage.
- businesspeople — a person regularly employed in business, especially a white-collar worker, executive, or owner.
- by implication — If you say that something is the case by implication, you mean that a statement, event, or situation implies that it is the case.
- cafeteria plan — a fringe-benefit plan under which employees may choose from among various benefits those that best fit their needs, up to a specified dollar value.