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14-letter words containing p, l

  • 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.
  • beauty parlour — A beauty parlour is a place where women can go to have beauty treatments, for example to have their hair, nails or make-up done.
  • 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 panthers — (in the US) a militant Black political party founded in 1965 to end the political dominance of White people
  • black skipjack — a small spotted tuna, Euthynnus yaito, of Indo-Pacific seas
  • black-eyed pea — Black-eyed peas are beige seeds with black marks that are eaten as a vegetable. They are from a plant called the cowpea.
  • 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
  • blepharoplasty — cosmetic surgery performed on the eyelid
  • bletchley park — the Buckinghamshire estate which was the centre of British code-breaking operations during World War II
  • 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 platelet — any of the minute, disklike, colorless elements of the blood that are essential for normal clotting
  • blood pressure — the pressure exerted by the blood on the inner walls of the arteries, being relative to the elasticity and diameter of the vessels and the force of the heartbeat
  • 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.
  • blow one's top — to lose one's temper
  • 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
  • break-up value — the value of an organization assuming that it will not continue to trade
  • breast implant — an object such as a sachet filled with gel introduced surgically into a woman's breast to enlarge it
  • bubble company — a company whose shares are highly valued and then plummet
  • bubonic plague — Bubonic plague is a serious infectious disease spread by rats. It killed many people during the Middle Ages.
  • budget surplus — the amount by which government income from taxation, customs duties, etc, exceeds expenditure in any one fiscal year
  • 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
  • bulk transport — the transport of large quantities of goods or commodities in lorries, ships, or by rail
  • bush telegraph — a means of communication between primitive peoples over large areas, as by drum beats
  • 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.
  • butylene group — any of four bivalent isomeric groups having the formula –C 4 H 8 –.
  • 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.
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