15-letter words containing s, o, r
- atrabiliousness — The state or quality of being characterized by melancholy or glumness.
- augusta gregory — Lady Augusta (Isabella Augusta Persse) 1852–1932, Irish dramatist.
- aurora borealis — the aurora seen around the North Pole
- autobiographers — Plural form of autobiographer.
- autobiographies — Plural form of autobiography.
- autodestructive — likely to cause one's own destruction
- autofluorescent — Of, pertaining to, or exhibiting autofluorescence.
- autoradiographs — Plural form of autoradiograph.
- autostereoscopy — The display of stereoscopic images without the use of special viewing equipment.
- autotransformer — a transformer in which part of the winding is common to both primary and secondary circuits
- autotransfusion — a process in which a patient receives some of his or her own blood in a transfusion rather than a donor's blood
- autotransplants — Plural form of autotransplant.
- aviator glasses — sunglasses that look like goggles
- azobisformamide — (chemistry) azodicarbonamide.
- backup software — (tool, software) Software for doing a backup, often included as part of the operating system. Backup software should provide ways to specify what files get backed up and to where. It may include its own scheduling function to automate the procedure or, preferably, work with generic scheduling facilities. It may include facilities for managing the backup media (e.g. maintaining an index of tapes) and for restoring files from backups. Examples are Unix's dump command and Windows's ntbackup.
- bacterial ghost — a bacterial cell that is emptied and filled artificially with another substance
- bacteriophagous — Pertaining to the predation and consumption of bacterium.
- bad housekeeper — a person who is not an efficient and thrifty domestic manager
- bandstop filter — A bandstop filter is a filter designed to eliminate all frequencies within a band of frequencies.
- baptism of fire — If someone who has just begun a new job has a baptism of fire, they immediately have to cope with very many severe difficulties and obstacles.
- barbizon school — a group of French painters of landscapes of the 1840s, including Théodore Rousseau, Daubigny, Diaz, Corot, and Millet
- barn conversion — the adaptation of a farm barn into a building serving a different use, such as a house or commercial premises
- barn-door skate — an Atlantic skate, Raja laevis, that grows to a length of 4 feet (1.2 meters) or more.
- barry mountains — a mountain range in SE Australia, in E Victoria: part of the Australian Alps
- basic autocoder — Early system on IBM 7070. Listed in CACM 2(5):16 (May 1959).
- basse-normandie — a region of NW France, on the English Channel: consists of the Cherbourg peninsula in the west rising to the Normandy hills in the east; mainly agricultural
- bathroom scales — scales typically kept in a bathroom for people to weigh themselves
- be short on sth — If someone or something is short on a particular good quality, they do not have as much of it as you think they should have.
- be snowed under — to be overwhelmed, esp with paperwork
- be spoiling for — to have an aggressive desire for (a fight, etc)
- bear comparison — to be sufficiently similar in class or range to be compared with (something else), esp favourably
- beast of burden — A beast of burden is an animal such as an ox or a donkey that is used for carrying or pulling things.
- bedford heights — a town in N Ohio.
- bedroom slipper — a soft shoe worn in the house
- beef stroganoff — a dish of thin strips of beef cooked with onions, mushrooms, and seasonings, served in a sour-cream sauce
- before the mast — as an apprentice seaman
- belief revision — (artificial intelligence) The area of theory change in which preservation of the information in the theory to be changed plays a key role. A fundamental issue in belief revision is how to decide what information to retract in order to maintain consistency, when the addition of a new belief to a theory would make it inconsistent. Usually, an ordering on the sentences of the theory is used to determine priorities among sentences, so that those with lower priority can be retracted. This ordering can be difficult to generate and maintain. The postulates of the AGM Theory for Belief Revision describe minimal properties a revision process should have.
- 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
- bergius process — a method of hydrogenation formerly used with coal to produce an oil similar to petroleum.
- beta conversion — (theory) A term from lambda-calculus for beta reduction or beta abstraction.
- beurre noisette — a sauce of butter cooked until golden or nut brown, sometimes flavored with capers, vinegar, herbs, etc.
- binomial series — an infinite series obtained by expanding a binomial raised to a power that is not a positive integer.
- bioastronautics — the study of the effects of space flight on living organisms
- biodestructible — biodegradable
- biogeochemistry — the science of biological, chemical, and geological aspects of the environment
- biostratigraphy — the examination of the ages of rock strata by using fossils
- biot-savart law — the law that the magnetic induction near a long, straight conductor, as wire, varies inversely as the distance from the conductor and directly as the intensity of the current in the conductor.
- 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.
- biscuit tortoni — an individual portion of tortoni, frozen and served in a small cup, often topped with ground almonds.
- 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.