14-letter words containing s, i, l, b
- baranof island — an island off SE Alaska, in the western part of the Alexander Archipelago. Area: 4162 sq km (1607 sq miles)
- barbara liskov — (person) Professor Barbara Liskov was the first US woman to be awarded a PhD in computing, and her innovations can be found in every modern programming language. She currently (2009) heads the Programming Methodology Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Liskov's design innovations have, over the decades, made software more reliable and easier to maintain. She has invented two computer progamming languages: CLU, an object-orientated language, and Argus, a distributed programming language. Liskov's research forms the basis of modern programming languages such as Java, C# and C++. One of the biggest impacts of her work came from her contributions to the use of data abstraction, a method for organising complex programs. See Liskov substitution principle. In June 2009 she will receive the A. M. Turing Award.
- barium sulfate — an odorless, tasteless, white powder, BaSO4, insoluble in water: it is used as a paint pigment, as a filler for paper, textiles , etc., and as an opaque substance that is ingested to aid in making diagnostic X-rays of the stomach and intestine
- barium sulfide — a gray or yellowish-green, water-soluble, poisonous powder, BaS, used chiefly as a depilatory and as an intermediate in the synthesis of pigments, especially lithopone.
- barrel shifter — (hardware) A hardware device that can shift or rotate a data word by any number of bits in a single operation. It is implemented like a multiplexor, each output can be connected to any input depending on the shift distance.
- barrier island — a long island, parallel to the coastline, formed from a ridge of sand (barrier beach) thrown up by the waves, that serves the shore as a protective barrier against tidal waves, storms, etc.
- basal ganglion — any of several masses of gray matter in each cerebral hemisphere.
- bascule bridge — a kind of drawbridge counterweighted so that it can be raised and lowered easily
- bascule-bridge — a device operating like a balance or seesaw, especially an arrangement of a movable bridge (bascule bridge) by which the rising floor or section is counterbalanced by a weight.
- bastard ridley — ridley (def 1).
- bastard-ridley — ridley (def 1).
- battle cruiser — A battle cruiser is a large fast warship that is lighter than a battleship and moves more easily.
- battle of wits — If you refer to a situation as a battle of wits, you mean that it involves people with opposing aims who compete with each other using their intelligence, rather than force.
- battle station — the place or position that one is assigned to for battle or in an emergency.
- batwing sleeve — a sleeve of a garment with a deep armhole and a tight wrist
- bazillionaires — Plural form of bazillionaire.
- belisha beacon — a flashing light in an orange globe mounted on a post, indicating a pedestrian crossing on a road
- belletristical — relating to the fine arts
- bellingshausen — Fabian Gottlieb von [fey-bee-uh n-got-leeb von] /ˈfeɪ bi ənˈgɒt lib vɒn/ (Show IPA), (Faddey Faddeyevich Bellingshauzen) 1778–1852, Russian naval officer and explorer.
- belvoir castle — a castle in Leicestershire, near Grantham (in Lincolnshire): seat of the Dukes of Rutland; rebuilt by James Wyatt in 1816
- beneficialness — the state of being beneficial
- benzosulfimide — saccharin.
- berkner island — an island in Antarctica, in the S Weddell Sea, between the Ronne Ice Shelf and the Filchner Ice Shelf.
- bernicle goose — barnacle goose
- beside oneself — If you are beside yourself with anger or excitement, you are extremely angry or excited.
- between whiles — now and then; at intervals
- bewilderedness — the state of being bewildered
- bicuspid valve — mitral valve
- bidialectalism — the state of being bidialectal
- bildungsromane — a type of novel concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young protagonist.
- bilious attack — a group of symptoms consisting of headache, abdominal pain, and constipation
- bill of rights — A Bill of Rights is a written list of citizens' rights which is usually part of the constitution of a country.
- billy no-mates — a person with no friends
- bioelectronics — a branch of electronics that deals with electronic devices, implants, etc. used in medicine and biological research
- biolinguistics — the study of language functions as they relate to or derive from the biological characteristics of an organism.
- bioluminescent — the production of light by living organisms.
- bioregionalism — the conviction that environmental and social policies should be determined by the bioregion rather than economics or politics
- bioregionalist — someone who believes in bioregionalism
- biostatistical — relating to biostatistics
- bipolarisation — the act of bipolarising
- bircher muesli — a type of muesli containing softened oats, dried fruit, and apple
- birthing stool — a stool constructed to allow a woman in labour to give birth in a sitting position
- biscuit barrel — an airtight container of circular section equipped with a lid and used for storing biscuits
- bishops' bible — an English translation of the Bible made under the direction of Matthew Parker and published in 1568: the recognized translation of the Bible in England until the Authorized (King James) Version of 1611.
- bite one's lip — If you bite your lip or your tongue, you stop yourself from saying something that you want to say, because it would be the wrong thing to say in the circumstances.
- bitmap display — (hardware) A computer output device where each pixel displayed on the monitor screen corresponds directly to one or more bits in the computer's video memory. Such a display can be updated extremely rapidly since changing a pixel involves only a single processor write to memory compared with a terminal or VDU connected via a serial line where the speed of the serial line limits the speed at which the display can be changed. Most modern personal computers and workstations have bitmap displays, allowing the efficient use of graphical user interfaces, interactive graphics and a choice of on-screen fonts. Some more expensive systems still delegate graphics operations to dedicated hardware such as graphics accelerators. The bitmap display might be traced back to the earliest days of computing when the Manchester University Mark I(?) computer, developed by F.C. Williams and T. Kilburn shortly after the Second World War. This used a storage tube as its working memory. Phosphor dots were used to store single bits of data which could be read by the user and interpreted as binary numbers.
- bits per pixel — (hardware, graphics) (bpp) The number of bits of information stored per pixel of an image or displayed by a graphics adapter. The more bits there are, the more colours can be represented, but the more memory is required to store or display the image. A colour can be described by the intensities of red, green and blue (RGB) components. Allowing 8 bits (1 byte) per component (24 bits per pixel) gives 256 levels for each component and over 16 million different colours - more than the human eye can distinguish. Microsoft Windows [and others?] calls this truecolour. An image of 1024x768 with 24 bpp requires over 2 MB of memory. "High colour" uses 16 bpp (or 15 bpp), 5 bits for blue, 5 bits for red and 6 bits for green. This reduced colour precision gives a slight loss of image quality at a 1/3 saving on memory. Standard VGA uses a palette of 16 colours (4 bpp), each colour in the palette is 24 bit. Standard SVGA uses a palette of 256 colours (8 bpp). Some graphics hardware and software support 32-bit colour depths, including an 8-bit "alpha channel" for transparency effects.
- black as night — totally dark
- black diamonds — carbonado1 .
- black selenium — an allotropic form of selenium occurring as a black, amorphous, water-insoluble, light-sensitive powder: used chiefly in photoelectric cells.