14-letter words containing s, m
- at one's mercy — compassionate or kindly forbearance shown toward an offender, an enemy, or other person in one's power; compassion, pity, or benevolence: Have mercy on the poor sinner.
- atacama desert — a desert region along the W coast of South America, mainly in N Chile: a major source of nitrates. Area: about 80 000 sq km (31 000 sq miles)
- atomic physics — the branch of physics concerned with the structure and behaviour of atomic nuclei
- axiomatisation — the process of reducing down to a system of basic truths, or axioms
- backstrap loom — a simple horizontal loom, used especially in Central and South America, on which one of two beams holding the warp yarn is attached to a strap that passes across the weaver's back.
- ball of muscle — a very strong, fit, or forceful person
- balsam of peru — an aromatic balsam that is obtained from the tropical South American leguminous tree Myroxylon pereirae and is similar to balsam of Tolu
- balsam of tolu — tolu
- balsaminaceous — of, relating to, or belonging to the Balsaminaceae, a family of flowering plants, including balsam and touch-me-not, that have irregular flowers and explosive capsules
- bank statement — A bank statement is a printed document showing all the money paid into and taken out of a bank account. Bank statements are usually sent by a bank to a customer at regular intervals.
- baptismal font — a large bowl for baptismal water, usually mounted on a pedestal
- baptismal name — Christian name (def 1).
- baptismal vows — the solemn promises made during baptism, either by the person baptized or by his or her sponsors
- 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.
- base community — (especially in South America) a group of people taking part in religious devotions and Bible study, who seek to apply this in their socioeconomic and political situation.
- base component — the system of rules in a transformational grammar that specify the deep structure of the language
- basidiomycetes — Mycology. any of a group of fungi constituting the phylum Basidiomycota of the kingdom Fungi (or, in older classification schemes, the class Basidiomycetes of the kingdom Plantae), characterized by bearing the spores on a basidium, including the smuts, rust, mushrooms, and puffballs.
- bay psalm book — a translation of the Psalms by John Eliot and others: the first book published (1640) in America.
- bayes' theorem — the fundamental result which expresses the conditional probability P(E/A) of an event E given an event A as P(A/E).P(E)/P(A); more generally, where En is one of a set of values Ei which partition the sample space, P(En/A) = P(A/En)P(En)/Σ P(A/Ei)P(Ei). This enables prior estimates of probability to be continually revised in the light of observations
- béchamel sauce — a thick white sauce flavoured with onion and seasonings
- bechamel-sauce — a white sauce, sometimes seasoned with onion and nutmeg.
- beclomethasone — a potent synthetic corticosteroid, C 28 H 37 ClO 7 , prepared as an inhalant in the treatment of bronchial asthma.
- bedroom suburb — a commuter suburb, from which people travel to the city centre to work
- bedside manner — A doctor's bedside manner is the way in which they talk to their patients.
- benzosulfimide — saccharin.
- bermuda shorts — close-fitting shorts that come down to the knees
- bessemer steel — steel made by the Bessemer process.
- bethlehem sage — a plant, Pulmonaria saccharata, of the borage family, native to Europe, having mottled, white leaves and white or reddish-purple flowers in clusters.
- beyond measure — If you say that something has changed or that it has affected you beyond measure, you are emphasizing that it has done this to a great extent.
- biceps femoris — See under biceps.
- bide sb's time — If you bide your time, you wait for a good opportunity before doing something.
- bidialectalism — the state of being bidialectal
- big brotherism — paternalistic authoritarianism that seeks to supply the needs and regulate the conduct of people.
- bikini bottoms — the part of a bikini worn over the groin
- bildungsromane — a type of novel concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young protagonist.
- billy no-mates — a person with no friends
- bioinformatics — the branch of information science concerned with large databases of biochemical or pharmaceutical information
- bioluminescent — the production of light by living organisms.
- biomathematics — the study of the application of mathematics to biology
- biometric risk — Biometric risk covers all risks related to human life conditions, such as death, birth, disability, age, and number of children.
- bioregionalism — the conviction that environmental and social policies should be determined by the bioregion rather than economics or politics
- biosystematics — the study of the variation and evolution of a population of organisms in relation to their taxonomic classification
- biosystematist — someone who studies or works professionally in the field of biosystematics
- bircher muesli — a type of muesli containing softened oats, dried fruit, and apple
- bishop's mitre — a European heteropterous bug, Aelia acuminata, whose larvae are a pest of cereal grasses: family Pentatomidae
- 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.
- 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.
- blind stamping — an impression on a book cover without using colour or gold leaf