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16-letter words containing s, a, b

  • beaux' stratagem — a comedy (1707) by George Farquhar.
  • beefsteak fungus — an edible reddish bracket fungus, Fistulina hepatica, that grows esp on oak trees and oozes a bloodlike juice
  • beefsteak tomato — a very large fleshy variety of tomato
  • behavioural sink — a small area in which people or animals live in overcrowded conditions
  • belgian malinois — one of a Belgian breed of medium-sized dogs having a short coat, tan to dark brown in color, a black mask, and erect ears, bred originally as a sheepherding dog.
  • belgian sheepdog — any of a Belgian breed of large herding dog with a black coat, sometimes used as a guide dog
  • bells of ireland — an annual garden plant, Moluccella laevis, whose flowers have a green cup-shaped calyx: family Lamiaceae (labiates)
  • belted-bias tire — a motor-vehicle tire of the same construction as a bias-ply tire but with an added belt of steel or a strong synthetic material under the tread.
  • benoit samuelson — Joan (Joan Benoit) born 1957, U.S. distance runner: first Olympic marathon women's winner, 1984.
  • benzoate of soda — sodium benzoate
  • bertrand russell — (person)   (1872-1970) A British mathematician, the discoverer of Russell's paradox.
  • best-before date — a date on packaged food indicating how long it is safe to keep it
  • beta abstraction — [lambda-calculus] The conversion of an expression to an application of a lambda abstraction to an argument expression. Some subterm of the original expression becomes the argument of the abstraction and the rest becomes its body. E.g. 4+1 --> (\ x . x+1) 4 The opposite of beta abstraction is beta reduction. These are the two kinds of beta conversion.
  • bias-belted tire — belted-bias tire.
  • 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.
  • big bag of pages — (BIBOP) Where data objects are tagged with some kind of descriptor (giving their size or type for example) memory can be saved by storing objects with the same descriptor in one "page" of memory. The most significant bits of an object's address are used as the BIBOP page number. This is looked up in a BIBOP table to find the descriptor for all objects in that page. This idea is similar to the "zones" used in some Lisp systems (e.g. LeLisp).
  • bihar and orissa — a former province of NE India: now divided into the states of Bihar and Odisha (formerly Orissa).
  • biliary calculus — an abnormal stonelike mass, usually of cholesterol, formed in the gallbladder or bile passages.
  • 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
  • binocular fusion — fusion (def 5a).
  • binocular-fusion — the act or process of fusing; the state of being fused.
  • 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-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 honours — (in Britain) honorary titles conferred on the official birthday of the sovereign
  • birthday present — a gift given to someone on their birthday
  • bismarck herring — marinaded herring, served cold
  • bite one's nails — to chew off the ends of one's fingernails
  • black nightshade — a poisonous solanaceous plant, Solanum nigrum, a common weed in cultivated land, having small white flowers with backward-curved petals and black berry-like fruits
  • black-eyed susan — any of several North American plants of the genus Rudbeckia, esp R. hirta, having flower heads of orange-yellow rays and brown-black centres: family Asteraceae (composites)
  • blasting gelatin — a type of plastic dynamite containing about 7 percent of a cellulose nitrate, used chiefly in underwater work.
  • blenheim spaniel — a variety of toy spaniel that is white with reddish-brown spots
  • blind man's buff — a game in which a blindfolded person tries to catch and identify the other players
  • blind man's rule — a carpenter's rule having large numbers to permit its reading in dim light.
  • blind salamander — any of several North American salamanders, especially of the genera Typhlotriton, Typhlomolge, and Haideotriton, that inhabit underground streams or deep wells and have undeveloped eyes and scant pigmentation.
  • blow one's stack — to lose one's temper; fly into a rage
  • bluegrass region — a region in central Kentucky, famous for its horse farms and fields of bluegrass.
  • board of pardons — an agency that determines which prisoners are to be released on parole or discretionary mandatory supervision and recommends pardons
  • boarding kennels — a place where dog owners can pay to have their dogs looked after while they are away
  • boatswain's mate — a job classification in the US navy
  • boatswain's pipe — a whistle used formerly to give orders on board ship
  • bonded warehouse — a warehouse in which dutiable goods are deposited until duty is paid or the goods are cleared for export
  • bonneville flats — an area of salt flats in the W part of Great Salt Lake Desert, in NW Utah: site of automobile speed tests.
  • 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.
  • bordelaise sauce — a dark sauce made from meat stock, flour, wine, onions, seasonings, etc., served over broiled meat
  • bornholm disease — an epidemic virus infection characterized by pain round the base of the chest
  • borosilicic acid — any of several hypothetical acids that form borosilicates.
  • boston cream pie — a cake of two layers with icing and a creamy filling
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