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16-letter words containing p, s, r

  • appraisal method — a method used for the appraisal of an employee
  • appreciativeness — The state or quality of being appreciative.
  • apprehensiveness — uneasy or fearful about something that might happen: apprehensive for the safety of the mountain climbers.
  • approachableness — capable of being approached; accessible.
  • april fool's day — April Fool's Day is the 1st of April, the day on which people traditionally play tricks on each other.
  • april fools' day — April 1, a day when practical jokes or tricks are played on unsuspecting people.
  • armillary sphere — a model of the celestial sphere consisting of rings representing the relative positions of the celestial equator, ecliptic, etc, used by early astronomers for determining the positions of stars
  • arthroscopically — By means of arthroscopy.
  • ashurnasirpal ii — ("the Merciless") died 859? b.c, warrior king of Assyria 884?–859 b.c.
  • asparaginic acid — aspartic acid.
  • asparagus beetle — either of two leaf beetles of the genus Crioceris that feed on the asparagus plant in both the larval and adult stages.
  • asparagus spears — the succulent young shoots of Asparagus officinalis, which may be cooked and eaten
  • assistant priest — a person who assists a priest in their work or who is not yet fully qualified as a priest
  • assurnasirpal ii — Ashurnasirpal II.
  • aston dark space — the dark region between the cathode and the cathode glow in a vacuum tube, occurring when the pressure is low.
  • astrophotography — the photography of celestial bodies used in astronomy
  • at the sharp end — If you say that someone is at the sharp end of a particular activity or type of work, you mean that they are involved in the most difficult or dangerous aspects of it.
  • atmospheric tide — a movement of atmospheric masses caused by the gravitational attraction of the sun and moon and by daily solar heating.
  • auditory aphasia — aphasia in which there is no comprehension of spoken words; word deafness.
  • australopithecus — an extinct genus of small-brained,large-toothed bipedal hominids that lived in Africa between one and four million years ago.
  • autostereoscopic — Of or pertaining to autostereoscopy.
  • aversion therapy — a method of suppressing an undesirable habit, such as excessive smoking, by causing the subject to associate an unpleasant effect, such as an electric shock or nausea, with the habit
  • axminster carpet — a type of patterned carpet with a cut pile
  • azuero peninsula — a peninsula in SW Panama, bordered on the E by the Gulf of Panama.
  • banana republics — any of the small countries in the tropics, especially in the Western Hemisphere, whose economies are largely dependent on fruit exports, tourism, and foreign investors.
  • band-pass filter — a filter that transmits only those currents having a frequency lying within specified limits
  • barbecue stopper — a controversial current-affairs issue
  • bargaining scope — the range of topics within the scope of a particular set of negotiations leading to a collective agreement
  • bashkir republic — a constituent republic of E central Russia, in the S Urals: established as the first Soviet autonomous republic in 1919; rich mineral resources. Capital: Ufa. Pop: 4 012 900 (2002). Area: 143 600 sq km (55 430 sq miles)
  • basque provinces — an autonomous region of N Spain, comprising the provinces of Álava, Guipúzcoa, and Vizcaya: inhabited mainly by Basques, who retained virtual autonomy from the 9th to the 19th century. Pop: 1 840 700 (2003 est). Area: about 7250 sq km (2800 sq miles)
  • bastard pointing — an imitation of tuck pointing, having a fillet made from the mortar of the joint.
  • batch processing — manufacturing products or treating materials in batches, by passing the output of one process to subsequent processes
  • bearing pedestal — an independent support for a bearing, usually incorporating a bearing housing
  • beauty therapist — a person whose job is to carry out treatments to improve a person's appearance, such as facials, manicures, removal of unwanted hair, etc
  • bessemer process — (formerly) a process for producing steel by blowing air through molten pig iron at about 1250°C in a Bessemer converter: silicon, manganese, and phosphorus impurities are removed and the carbon content is controlled
  • bimetallic strip — a strip consisting of two metals of different coefficients of expansion welded together so that it buckles on heating: used in thermostats, etc
  • bipolar disorder — Bipolar disorder is a mental illness in which a person's state of mind changes between extreme happiness and extreme depression.
  • bird of paradise — A bird of paradise is a songbird which is found mainly in New Guinea. The male birds have very brightly coloured feathers.
  • bird's-eye maple — a cut of sugar maple wood used especially for veneers, having a wavy grain with many dark, circular markings.
  • bird's-nest soup — a rich spicy Chinese soup made from the outer part of the nests of SE Asian swifts of the genus Collocalia
  • bird-of-paradise — Also called bird-of-paradise flower. any of several plants of the genus Strelitzia, native to southern Africa, especially S. reginae, having a large, showy orange and blue inflorescence.
  • birthday present — a gift given to someone on their birthday
  • bloomsbury group — a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals living and working in and around Bloomsbury in London from about 1907 to 1930. Influenced by the philosophy of G. E. Moore, they included Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and John Maynard Keynes
  • board of pardons — an agency that determines which prisoners are to be released on parole or discretionary mandatory supervision and recommends pardons
  • 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.
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