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19-letter words containing r, i, o

  • atmospheric braking — a technique of reentry in which the vehicle is maneuvered in the upper atmosphere so as to lose velocity by utilizing drag without overheating.
  • atrial fibrillation — a local and uncontrollable twitching of muscle fibres that results in rapid and irregular heart and pulse rate
  • attachment disorder — an emotional and behavioral disorder arising from a failure to form a strong bond with one’s primary caregiver in early childhood and affecting one’s social relationships in later childhood and adulthood. See also attachment (def 3a).
  • audio response unit — a device that enables a computer to give a spoken response by generating sounds similar to human speech.
  • augsburg confession — the statement of beliefs and doctrines of the Lutherans, formulated by Melanchthon and endorsed by the Lutheran princes, which was presented at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 and which became the chief creed of the Lutheran Church.
  • auriculoventricular — atrioventricular.
  • austro-prussian war — the war (1866) in which Prussia, Italy, and some minor German states opposed Austria, Saxony, Hanover, and the states of southern Germany.
  • author's alteration — a correction or change made in typeset copy that is not a correction of an error introduced by the compositor. Abbreviation: AA, A.A., a.a., aa.
  • autoerotic asphyxia — asphyxia caused by intentionally strangling oneself while masturbating in order to intensify the orgasm through reduced oxygen flow to the brain.
  • autotransplantation — autograft.
  • ave regina coelorum — a Latin hymn in honor of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven.
  • baader-meinhof gang — a group of left-wing West German terrorists, active in the 1970s, who were dedicated to the violent overthrow of capitalist society
  • bachelor of science — A Bachelor of Science is a first degree in a science subject. In British English, it can also mean a person with that degree. The abbreviation BSc or , BSc is also used.
  • backward compatible — backward compatibility
  • bacteriochlorophyll — a pale blue-gray form of chlorophyll that is unique to the photosynthetic but anaerobic purple bacteria.
  • baja california sur — a state of NW Mexico, in the S part of the Lower California peninsula. Capital: La Paz. Pop: 423 516 (2000). Area: 73 475 sq km (28 363 sq miles)
  • balfour declaration — the statement made by Arthur Balfour in 1917 of British support for the setting up of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, provided that the rights of "existing non-Jewish communities" in Palestine could be safeguarded
  • ballistocardiograph — an instrument that records the slight recoil of the body, while on a special bed, caused by the contractions of the heart: used to measure cardiac pumping power and the elasticity of the aorta
  • banff national park — a national reserve, 2585 sq. mi. (6695 sq. km), in the Rocky Mountains, in SW Alberta, Canada.
  • bank reconciliation — A bank reconciliation is the process of adjusting a bank statement to show transactions that have occurred since the date of issue, or a document showing this.
  • bankruptcy petition — an official request for protection under bankruptcy laws, which initiates bankruptcy proceedings
  • bargaining position — the position of a person, group, or organization in a negotiation, with respect to their ability to achieve a deal which is favourable to themselves
  • barometric gradient — pressure gradient
  • barometric pressure — atmospheric pressure as indicated by a barometer
  • baudotbetical order — (algorithm)   /baw do bet' i k*l/ Sorted into an order where numerics and special characters are intermixed by sorting a 5-bit Baudot code file ignoring the numeric shift and unshift codes.
  • bbc networking club — (body)   A bulletin board run by the British Broadcasting Corporation Education department from April 1994 to 30 Nov 1995.
  • be burnt to a crisp — If something is burnt to a crisp, it is completely burnt.
  • be someone's junior — to be younger than someone
  • beauty preparations — the cosmetics, creams etc used to improve someone's beauty
  • beggar-my-neighbour — a card game in which one player tries to win all the cards of the other player
  • beginning inventory — A beginning inventory is all of the goods, services, or materials that a business has available for use or sale at the start of a new accounting period.
  • behavioral genetics — an interdisciplinary field studying the effects of genetics and hereditary factors on animal and human behavior.
  • behavioral medicine — an interdisciplinary field that uses the concepts and techniques of the behavioral sciences to improve physical and emotional health.
  • behavioural science — the application of scientific methods to the study of the behaviour of organisms
  • behind closed doors — If people have talks and discussions behind closed doors, they have them in private because they want them to be kept secret.
  • benefit performance — a theatrical or musical performance in aid of charity
  • bernoulli principle — (Or "air foil principle", after Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli, 1700-1782) The law that pressure in a fluid decreases with the rate of flow. It has been applied to a class of hard disk drives. See Bernoulli Box.
  • bernoulli's theorem — Statistics. law of averages (def 1).
  • bernstein condition — (parallel)   Processes cannot execute in parallel if one effects values used by the other. Nor can they execute in parallel if any subsequent process uses data effected by both, i.e. whose value might depend on the order of execution.
  • betamethyl acrolein — crotonaldehyde.
  • bicarbonate of soda — Bicarbonate of soda is a white powder which is used in baking to make cakes rise, and also as a medicine for your stomach.
  • bill of particulars — an itemized statement of claims or counterclaims provided to the opposing party of a lawsuit
  • binary large object — (database)   (BLOB) A large block of data stored in a database, such as an image or sound file. A BLOB has no structure which can be interpreted by the database management system but is known only by its size and location.
  • binding arbitration — dispute resolution
  • binocular disparity — the small differences in the positions of the parts of the images falling on each eye that results when each eye views the scene from a slightly different position; these differences make stereoscopic vision possible
  • binomial experiment — an experiment consisting of a fixed number of independent trials each with two possible outcomes, success and failure, and the same probability of success. The probability of a given number of successes is described by a binominal distribution
  • bird's-eye primrose — a Eurasian primrose, Primula farinosa, having clusters of purplish flowers with yellow centres
  • bird's-foot trefoil — any of various creeping leguminous Eurasian plants of the genus Lotus, esp L. corniculatus, with red-tipped yellow flowers and seed pods resembling the claws of a bird
  • bismuth oxychloride — a white, crystalline, water-insoluble powder, BiOCl, used chiefly in the manufacture of pigments, face powders, and artificial pearls.
  • bit-paired keyboard — (hardware)   (Obsolete, or "bit-shift keyboard") A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed. In order to avoid making the thing more of a Rube Goldberg kluge than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the same basic bit pattern on one key. Looking at the ASCII chart, we find: high low bits bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 010 ! " # $ % & ' ( ) 011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). This was *not* the weirdest variant of the QWERTY layout widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029 card punches. When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, there was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product look like an office typewriter. These alternatives became known as "bit-paired" and "typewriter-paired" keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical - and because most hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was little pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter standard. The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The "typewriter-paired" standard became universal, "bit-paired" hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse.
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