16-letter words containing p, t
- autobogotiphobia — bogotify
- autoethnographic — Using ethnographic techniques to describe one's own life, or events in which one is a participant.
- automanipulation — physical stimulation of one's own genitals.
- automatic pistol — a type of pistol having a mechanism that throws out the empty shell, puts in a new one, and prepares the pistol to be fired again.
- automatic repeat — a key on the keyboard of a typewriter, computer, etc, which, when depressed continuously, produces the character repeatedly until the key is released
- autoradiographic — Of or pertaining to an autoradiograph, a radiographic image produced by the decay of a radioactive substance.
- 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
- avian diphtheria — a virus disease of chickens and other birds characterized by warty excrescences on the comb and wattles, and often by diphtherialike changes in the mucous membranes of the head.
- axminster carpet — a type of patterned carpet with a cut pile
- back-propagation — (Or "backpropagation") A learning algorithm for modifying a feed-forward neural network which minimises a continuous "error function" or "objective function." Back-propagation is a "gradient descent" method of training in that it uses gradient information to modify the network weights to decrease the value of the error function on subsequent tests of the inputs. Other gradient-based methods from numerical analysis can be used to train networks more efficiently. Back-propagation makes use of a mathematical trick when the network is simulated on a digital computer, yielding in just two traversals of the network (once forward, and once back) both the difference between the desired and actual output, and the derivatives of this difference with respect to the connection weights.
- bacterioplankton — (biology) The bacterial component of marine plankton.
- band-pass filter — a filter that transmits only those currents having a frequency lying within specified limits
- bankruptcy court — a section of the United States federal court which specializes in the handling of bankruptcy cases
- bankruptcy order — a court order appointing a receiver to manage the property of a debtor or bankrupt
- barbecue stopper — a controversial current-affairs issue
- basement complex — the undifferentiated assemblage of rock (basement rock) underlying the oldest stratified rocks in any region: usually crystalline, metamorphosed, and mostly, but not necessarily, Precambrian in age.
- 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
- batch production — production of goods in batches, rather than continuously
- bathythermograph — a device for measuring the temperature of the ocean at any specific depth down to c. 1,800 m (c. 5,900 ft)
- battery-operated — powered, driven, or operated with batteries
- bayonet practice — drill in the use of a bayonet
- bearing pedestal — an independent support for a bearing, usually incorporating a bearing housing
- beautiful people — wealthy, fashionable people of the leisure class
- 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
- behavior pattern — a recurrent way of acting by an individual or group toward a given object or in a given situation.
- behavior therapy — therapy employing behavior modification
- bermuda palmetto — a palm, Sabal bermudana, of Bermuda, having small, roundish, black fruit and leaves that are checkered beneath.
- beside the point — If you say that something is beside the point, you mean that it is not relevant to the subject that you are discussing.
- bicapitalisation — The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as PostScript, NeXT, NeWS, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalisation. Too many marketroid types think this sort of thing is really cute, even the 2,317th time they do it. Compare studlycaps.
- bicyclic terpene — (originally) any of a class of monocyclic hydrocarbons of the formula C 10 H 16 , obtained from plants.
- big picture, the — a long-range or overall view or account of some complex matter
- 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
- binary operation — a mathematical operation in which two elements are combined to yield a single result: Addition and multiplication are binary operations on the set of real numbers.
- biocompatibility — the capability of coexistence with living tissues or organisms without causing harm: Artificial joint adhesives must have biocompatibility with bone and muscle.
- 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.
- black-light trap — a trap for insects that uses ultraviolet light as an attractant.
- blink comparator — an optical instrument used to detect small differences in two photographs of the same field or object by viewing them alternately, switching rapidly from one to the other.
- 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