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14-letter words containing p, r, e, l

  • at one's peril — If you say that someone does something at their peril, you are warning them that they will probably suffer as a result of doing it.
  • autotetraploid — an individual or strain whose chromosome complement consists of four copies of a single genome due to doubling of an ancestral chromosome complement
  • b power supply — Electronics. B supply.
  • bachelor party — A bachelor party is a party for a man who is getting married very soon, to which only men are invited.
  • balance spring — hairspring.
  • ballet slipper — a heelless cloth or leather slipper worn by ballet dancers.
  • balsam of peru — an aromatic balsam that is obtained from the tropical South American leguminous tree Myroxylon pereirae and is similar to balsam of Tolu
  • 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.
  • banana problem — (programming, humour)   From the story of the little girl who said "I know how to spell "banana", but I don't know when to stop". Not knowing where or when to bring a production to a close (compare fencepost error). One may say "there is a banana problem" of an algorithm with poorly defined or incorrect termination conditions, or in discussing the evolution of a design that may be succumbing to featuritis (see also creeping elegance, creeping featuritis).
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • blotting paper — Blotting paper is thick soft paper that you use for soaking up and drying ink on a piece of paper.
  • bone porcelain — bone china.
  • 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
  • budget surplus — the amount by which government income from taxation, customs duties, etc, exceeds expenditure in any one fiscal year
  • 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
  • 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.
  • butylene group — any of four bivalent isomeric groups having the formula –C 4 H 8 –.
  • c power supply — a battery or other source of power for supplying a constant voltage bias to a control electrode of a vacuum tube.
  • cabbage looper — the larva of a noctuid moth, Trichoplusia ni, common throughout the U.S. and Canada, that feeds on a wide variety of vegetable crops, especially cabbage and lettuce.
  • 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.
  • call-up papers — a letter containing order to report for service
  • caller display — a facility which shows the number of an incoming call
  • cambridge lisp — A flavour of Lisp using BCPL. Sources owned by Fitznorman partners.
  • camelopardalis — a N constellation between Ursa Major and Cassiopeia; the Giraffe
  • camp counselor — activities supervisor
  • camp fire girl — a girl who is a member of Camp Fire, Inc., an organization for girls founded in 1910, and since 1975 also including boys, to promote character-building activities
  • camphor laurel — an Australian name for the camphor tree, now occurring in the wild in parts of Australia
  • campylobacters — Plural form of campylobacter.
  • cape canaveral — a cape on the E coast of Florida: site of the US Air Force Missile Test Centre, from which the majority of US space missions have been launched
  • cape trafalgar — a cape on the SW coast of Spain, south of Cádiz: scene of the decisive naval battle (1805) in which the French and Spanish fleets were defeated by the British under Nelson, who was mortally wounded
  • capillary tube — a glass tube with a fine bore and thick walls, used in thermometers, etc
  • capital letter — Capital letters are the same as capital s.
  • capital market — the financial institutions collectively that deal with medium-term and long-term capital and loans
  • carpet bowling — a form of bowls played indoors on a strip of carpet, at the centre of which lies an obstacle round which the bowl has to pass
  • carpet slipper — Carpet slippers are soft, comfortable slippers.
  • carrying place — portage (def 3).
  • cartridge clip — a metallic container holding cartridges for an automatic firearm
  • castrop-rauxel — an industrial city in W Germany, in North Rhine-Westphalia. Pop: 78 208 (2003 est)
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