15-letter words containing s, d, e
- belted sandfish — a sea bass, Serranus subligarius, inhabiting warm, shallow waters of the western Atlantic Ocean.
- ben day process — a method of adding texture, shading, or detail to line drawings by overlaying a transparent sheet of dots or any other pattern during platemaking
- beside the mark — not striking the point aimed at
- beyond question — a sentence in an interrogative form, addressed to someone in order to get information in reply.
- beyond sb's ken — If something is beyond your ken, you do not have enough knowledge to be able to understand it.
- bide one's time — to wait patiently for an opportunity
- big sandy creek — a river in central Colorado, flowing NE and SE to the Arkansas River near Lamar: site of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre. 200 miles (322 km) long.
- billings method — a natural method of birth control that involves examining the colour and viscosity of the cervical mucus to discover when ovulation is occurring
- biodestructible — biodegradable
- bird of passage — If you refer to someone as a bird of passage, you mean that they are staying in a place for a short time before going to another place.
- bird's eye view — You say that you have a bird's eye view of a place when you are looking down at it from a great height, so that you can see a long way but everything looks very small.
- bit on the side — an extramarital affair
- bits and pieces — You can use bits and pieces or bits and bobs to refer to a collection of different things.
- bits per second — (communications, unit) (bps, b/s) The unit in which data rate is measured. For example, a modem's data rate is usually measured in kilobits per second. In 1996, the maximum modem speed for use on the PSTN was 33.6 kbps, rising to 56 kbps in 1997. Note that kilo- (k), mega- (M), etc. in data rates denote powers of 1000, not 1024.
- blanc de blancs — white wine, esp. champagne, made from white grapes
- blasting powder — a form of gunpowder made with sodium nitrate instead of saltpeter, used chiefly for blasting rock, ore, etc.
- blended whiskey — whiskey that is a blend of straight whiskey and neutral spirits or of two or more straight whiskeys
- blessed trinity — Trinity (def 1).
- blocked records — (storage) Several records written as a contiguous block on magnetic tape so that they may be accessed in a single I/O operation. Blocking increases the amount of data that may be stored on a tape because there are fewer inter-block gaps. It requires that the tape drive or processor have a sufficiently large buffer to store the whole block.
- blood corpuscle — one of the cells in the blood
- bloodguiltiness — guilty of murder or bloodshed.
- bloody butchers — a hardy plant, Trillium sessile, common from New York to Georgia and westward, having stalkless, purple or green flowers.
- blossom-end rot — a disease of tomato and pepper caused by a deficiency of calcium, characterized by decay at the blossom end of the fruit.
- blow one's mind — (in a human or other conscious being) the element, part, substance, or process that reasons, thinks, feels, wills, perceives, judges, etc.: the processes of the human mind.
- blue wood aster — a composite plant, Aster cordifolius, of North America, having heart-shaped leaves and pale-blue flowers.
- blue-eyed grass — any of various mainly North American iridaceous marsh plants of the genus Sisyrinchium that have grasslike leaves and small flat starlike blue flowers
- body mass index — A person's body mass index is a measurement that represents the relationship between their weight and their height.
- boiled dressing — a cooked salad dressing thickened with egg yolks and often containing mustard.
- boiled potatoes — potatoes, usually peeled, cooked in boiling water
- borderline case — a person or thing that is not clearly classifiable as something
- borrower's card — a card issued by a library to individuals or organizations entitling them or their representatives to borrow materials.
- boustrophedonic — of or relating to lines written in opposite directions
- braille display — (hardware) (Or "refreshable braille display", "refreshable display") An electromechanical device that renders braille with tiny, independently controlled pins used to represent the state of dots in braille cells. Each pin, in its "on" state, raises above the top of its hole in the screen; in its "off" state, it drops below the top of its hole. Older systems used tiny solenoids to control the state of the pins; modern systems are piezoelectric. Typical dimensions of a braille display are 1 line of 40 cells, each cell of two-by-eight dots.
- brand awareness — the extent to which consumers are aware of a particular product or service
- brand extension — the practice of using a well-known brand name to promote new products or services in unrelated fields
- breeding season — the time of year during which animals breed
- bridge of sighs — a covered 16th-century bridge in Venice, between the Doges' Palace and the prisons, through which prisoners were formerly led to trial or execution
- brights-disease — a disease characterized by albuminuria and heightened blood pressure.
- brill's disease — a form of epidemic typhus fever in which the disease recurs years after the original infection
- bronze diabetes — hemochromatosis.
- brown-and-serve — requiring only a brief period of browning, as in an oven, before being ready to serve: brown-and-serve rolls.
- brownfield site — a disused site envisaged for redevelopment
- brunner's gland — any of the glands in the submucosal layer of the duodenum, secreting an alkaline fluid into the small intestine.
- brush discharge — a slightly luminous electrical discharge between points of high charge density when the charge density is insufficient to cause a spark or around sharp points on a highly charged conductor because of ionization of air molecules in their vicinity
- buffalo soldier — (formerly, especially among American Indians) a black soldier.
- building trades — the trades and professions concerned with the creation and finishing of buildings, such as carpenters, plasterers, masons, electricians, etc.
- bullnose header — bull header (def 1).
- bullnose-header — Also called bullnose header. a brick having one of the edges across its width rounded for laying as a header in a sill or the like.
- buried treasure — A surprising piece of code found in some program. While usually not wrong, it tends to vary from crufty to bletcherous, and has lain undiscovered only because it was functionally correct, however horrible it is. Used sarcastically, because what is found is anything *but* treasure. Buried treasure almost always needs to be dug up and removed. "I just found that the scheduler sorts its queue using bubble sort! Buried treasure!"
- bury st edmunds — a market town in E England, in Suffolk. Pop: 36 218 (2001)