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16-letter words containing s, p, a, t

  • aston dark space — the dark region between the cathode and the cathode glow in a vacuum tube, occurring when the pressure is low.
  • astrophotography — the photography of celestial bodies used in astronomy
  • asymptomatically — showing no evidence of disease.
  • at the last gasp — at the point of death
  • at the sharp end — If you say that someone is at the sharp end of a particular activity or type of work, you mean that they are involved in the most difficult or dangerous aspects of it.
  • atmospheric tide — a movement of atmospheric masses caused by the gravitational attraction of the sun and moon and by daily solar heating.
  • atomic physicist — a scientist specializing in atomic physics
  • auditory aphasia — aphasia in which there is no comprehension of spoken words; word deafness.
  • australopithecus — an extinct genus of small-brained,large-toothed bipedal hominids that lived in Africa between one and four million years ago.
  • automatic pistol — a type of pistol having a mechanism that throws out the empty shell, puts in a new one, and prepares the pistol to be fired again.
  • autostereoscopic — Of or pertaining to autostereoscopy.
  • aversion therapy — a method of suppressing an undesirable habit, such as excessive smoking, by causing the subject to associate an unpleasant effect, such as an electric shock or nausea, with the habit
  • axminster carpet — a type of patterned carpet with a cut pile
  • band-pass filter — a filter that transmits only those currents having a frequency lying within specified limits
  • barbecue stopper — a controversial current-affairs issue
  • basement complex — the undifferentiated assemblage of rock (basement rock) underlying the oldest stratified rocks in any region: usually crystalline, metamorphosed, and mostly, but not necessarily, Precambrian in age.
  • bastard pointing — an imitation of tuck pointing, having a fillet made from the mortar of the joint.
  • batch processing — manufacturing products or treating materials in batches, by passing the output of one process to subsequent processes
  • bearing pedestal — an independent support for a bearing, usually incorporating a bearing housing
  • beauty therapist — a person whose job is to carry out treatments to improve a person's appearance, such as facials, manicures, removal of unwanted hair, etc
  • 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.
  • 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
  • birthday present — a gift given to someone on their birthday
  • boatswain's pipe — a whistle used formerly to give orders on board ship
  • 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.
  • boston cream pie — a cake of two layers with icing and a creamy filling
  • boston tea party — a raid in 1773 made by citizens of Boston (disguised as Indians) on three British ships in the harbour as a protest against taxes on tea and the monopoly given to the East India Company. The contents of several hundred chests of tea were dumped into the harbour
  • boundary dispute — dispute between neighbours about the boundary between their properties
  • bouquet larkspur — a plant, Delphinium grandiflorum, of eastern Asia, having blue or whitish flowers and hairy fruit.
  • branchiopneustic — breathing by means of gills, as certain aquatic insect larvae.
  • brittany spaniel — a short-tailed French bird dog that typically has a smooth orange- or liver-and-white coat
  • brood parasitism — a type of parasitism in which a bird (brood parasite), as a cowbird or European cuckoo, lays and abandons its eggs in the nest of another species
  • buttercup squash — a small, usually dark-green squash that is a variety of Cucurbita maxima, having sweet orange flesh.
  • bypass capacitor — a capacitor which provides a low-impedance path for alternating current while not passing any direct current
  • bypass operation — an operation involving redirection of blood flow, either to avoid a diseased blood vessel or in order to perform heart surgery
  • canine distemper — distemper1 (def 1a).
  • cantor's paradox — the paradox derived from the supposition of an all-inclusive universal set, since every set has more subsets than members while every subset of such a universal set would be a member of it
  • capital reserves — the money which a company holds in reserve
  • capital sentence — the punishment of death for a crime
  • capitalistically — In a capitalistic manner.
  • capsizing moment — the moment of an upsetting couple.
  • carboxypeptidase — any of several digestive enzymes that catalyze the removal of an amino acid from the end of a peptide chain having a free carbonyl group.
  • career prospects — the probability or chance for future success in a profession
  • cascade particle — the least massive member of the xi particle family.
  • castor-oil plant — a tall euphorbiaceous Indian plant, Ricinus communis, cultivated in tropical regions for ornament and for its poisonous seeds, from which castor oil is extracted
  • catastrophically — of the nature of a catastrophe, or disastrous event; calamitous: a catastrophic failure of the dam.
  • catch sb napping — If someone is caught napping, something happens when they are not prepared for it, although they should have been.
  • celestial empire — Chinese Empire
  • celestial sphere — an imaginary sphere of infinitely large radius enclosing the universe so that all celestial bodies appear to be projected onto its surface
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