16-letter words containing p, o, t, s
- boatswain's pipe — a whistle used formerly to give orders on board ship
- 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.
- boston cream pie — a cake of two layers with icing and a creamy filling
- boston tea party — a raid in 1773 made by citizens of Boston (disguised as Indians) on three British ships in the harbour as a protest against taxes on tea and the monopoly given to the East India Company. The contents of several hundred chests of tea were dumped into the harbour
- boundary dispute — dispute between neighbours about the boundary between their properties
- bouquet larkspur — a plant, Delphinium grandiflorum, of eastern Asia, having blue or whitish flowers and hairy fruit.
- branchiopneustic — breathing by means of gills, as certain aquatic insect larvae.
- bristlecone pine — a coniferous tree, Pinus aristata, of the western US, bearing cones with bristle-like prickles: one of the longest-lived trees, useful in radiocarbon dating
- brood parasitism — a type of parasitism in which a bird (brood parasite), as a cowbird or European cuckoo, lays and abandons its eggs in the nest of another species
- brothel-creepers — soft-soled men's shoes that were originally popular in the 1950s
- bulletproof vest — a protective garment
- bust one's chops — Usually, chops. the jaw.
- button one's lip — to stop talking: often imperative
- bypass capacitor — a capacitor which provides a low-impedance path for alternating current while not passing any direct current
- bypass operation — an operation involving redirection of blood flow, either to avoid a diseased blood vessel or in order to perform heart surgery
- cantor's paradox — the paradox derived from the supposition of an all-inclusive universal set, since every set has more subsets than members while every subset of such a universal set would be a member of it
- capsizing moment — the moment of an upsetting couple.
- carboxypeptidase — any of several digestive enzymes that catalyze the removal of an amino acid from the end of a peptide chain having a free carbonyl group.
- career prospects — the probability or chance for future success in a profession
- castor-oil plant — a tall euphorbiaceous Indian plant, Ricinus communis, cultivated in tropical regions for ornament and for its poisonous seeds, from which castor oil is extracted
- catastrophically — of the nature of a catastrophe, or disastrous event; calamitous: a catastrophic failure of the dam.
- chattel personal — an item of movable personal property, such as furniture, domestic animals, etc
- checking deposit — a deposit on which cheques may be drawn
- chemolithotrophs — Plural form of chemolithotroph.
- chipped potatoes — chips
- cholecystography — radiography of the gall bladder after administration of a contrast medium
- chopped tomatoes — tomatoes cut into pieces
- chromatographies — Plural form of chromatography.
- chymotrypsinogen — the inactive precursor of chymotrypsin
- circumscriptions — Plural form of circumscription.
- circumsporozoite — (biology, of a protein) Located on the surface of a sporozoite (and involved in host cell recognition and invasion); abbreviated as CS.
- closed-captioned — (of a video recording) having subtitles which appear on screen only if the cassette is played through a special decoder
- community spirit — willingness and desire to participate in activities that promote a community
- compartmentalise — to divide into categories or compartments.
- complex sentence — a sentence containing at least one main clause and one subordinate clause
- complexity class — (algorithm) A collection of algorithms or computable functions with the same complexity.
- complicitousness — (rare, possibly nonstandard) Complicity.
- compliments slip — a slip of paper sent with a parcel that identifies the sender and expresses compliments
- composite family — the large and varied plant family Compositae (or Asteraceae), typified by herbaceous plants having alternate, opposite, or whorled leaves and a whorl of bracts surrounding the flower heads, which are usually composed of a disk containing tiny petalless flowers and a ray of petals extending from the flowers at the rim of the disk, some flower heads being composed only of a disk or a ray and some plants having clusters of flower heads, and including the aster, daisy, dandelion, goldenrod, marigold, ragweed, sunflower, thistle, and zinnia.
- composite motion — a motion in a deliberative body that combines elements of several related motions
- composite number — a positive integer that can be factorized into two or more other positive integers
- composite school — a secondary school offering both academic and nonacademic courses
- compositionality — The property of being compositional.
- compromise joint — a joint for linking together rails having different sections.
- computer science — the study of computers and their application
- computer studies — a course of study devoted to using and programming computers
- conspicuity tape — a highly reflective strip or tape used on a vehicle, clothing, etc., to make it more visible in low light.
- conspiratorially — the act of conspiring.
- constant mapping — (networking) A precursor to ARP used by some TCP software in which the destination Ethernet address is constructed from the top 24 bits of the source Ethernet address followed by the low 24 bits of the (class A) destination Internet address. For this scheme the top 24 bits of the Ethernet address must be the same on all hosts on the network.