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16-letter words containing p, t, e

  • biotic potential — the capacity of a population of organisms to increase in numbers under optimum environmental conditions.
  • 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
  • birthday present — a gift given to someone on their birthday
  • bit-mapped image — a computer image that is held in memory as a series of colored dots in a grid, each dot represented by one or more bits.
  • bitter principle — any of various bitter-tasting substances, such as aloin, usually extracted from plants
  • black bottom pie — a rich pie with a rum- or whiskey-flavored chocolate filling, often with a crust of crushed gingersnaps, and topped with whipped cream.
  • boatswain's pipe — a whistle used formerly to give orders on board ship
  • boolean-operator — any operation in which each of the operands and the result take one of two values.
  • 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.
  • brand acceptance — the extent to which consumers recognize and welcome a brand
  • break-even point — When a company reaches break-even point, the money it makes from the sale of goods or services is just enough to cover the cost of supplying those goods or services, but not enough to make a profit.
  • 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
  • brittany spaniel — a short-tailed French bird dog that typically has a smooth orange- or liver-and-white coat
  • broadloom carpet — any carpet woven on a wide loom and not having seams, especially one wider than 54 inches (137 cm).
  • brompton mixture — a mixture of narcotics, tranquilizers, and alcohol, used to kill pain for terminally ill patients
  • brothel-creepers — soft-soled men's shoes that were originally popular in the 1950s
  • bulletproof vest — a protective garment
  • bumper to bumper — If traffic is bumper to bumper, the vehicles are so close to one another that they are almost touching and are moving very slowly.
  • bumper-to-bumper — marked by a long line of cars moving slowly or with many stops and starts, one behind the other: bumper-to-bumper traffic.
  • bust one's chops — Usually, chops. the jaw.
  • buttercup family — the plant family Ranunculaceae, typified by mostly herbaceous plants having usually alternate leaves, multistaminate flowers sometimes lacking petals but with colorful sepals, and including the anemone, buttercup, clematis, columbine, delphinium, and monkshood.
  • buttercup squash — a small, usually dark-green squash that is a variety of Cucurbita maxima, having sweet orange flesh.
  • butterfly damper — a damper, as in a flue, that rotates about a central axis across its face.
  • button one's lip — to stop talking: often imperative
  • bypass operation — an operation involving redirection of blood flow, either to avoid a diseased blood vessel or in order to perform heart surgery
  • byzantine empire — the continuation of the Roman Empire in the East, esp after the deposition of the last emperor in Rome (476 ad). It was finally extinguished by the fall of Constantinople, its capital, in 1453
  • cabbage palmetto — a tropical American fan palm, Sabal palmetto, with edible leaf buds and leaves used in thatching
  • can't tell apart — If you can't tell two people or things apart, they look exactly the same to you.
  • can-not help but — to give or provide what is necessary to accomplish a task or satisfy a need; contribute strength or means to; render assistance to; cooperate effectively with; aid; assist: He planned to help me with my work. Let me help you with those packages.
  • canine distemper — distemper1 (def 1a).
  • cape cod cottage — a rectangular house one or one-and-one-half stories high, with a gable roof
  • cape cod lighter — a device for lighting a fire, as in a fireplace, consisting of a lump of nonflammable material on a metal rod, that is soaked in kerosene or the like and lighted with a match.
  • capital employed — the money used by a business for buying land, buildings, equipment etc
  • capital movement — the payments that flow between countries
  • capital reserves — the money which a company holds in reserve
  • capital sentence — the punishment of death for a crime
  • capsizing moment — the moment of an upsetting couple.
  • captive audience — a group of people who are unable by circumstances to avoid speeches, advertisements, etc
  • captive breeding — Captive breeding is the breeding of wild animals in places such as zoos, especially animals which have become rare in the wild.
  • 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
  • caricature plant — a tropical Old World shrub, Graptophyllum pictum, of the acanthus family, characterized by purple or red tubular flowers and leaf markings resembling the profile of a human face.
  • carnot principle — the principle that no heat engine can be more efficient than one operating on a Carnot cycle of reversible changes
  • carpatho-ukraine — a region in W Ukraine: ceded by Czechoslovakia in 1945.
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