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14-letter words containing s, p, i

  • auspiciousness — The state or quality of being auspicious or successful.
  • bacteriophages — Plural form of bacteriophage.
  • balance spring — hairspring.
  • ballet slipper — a heelless cloth or leather slipper worn by ballet dancers.
  • 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
  • barbados pride — Also called bead tree. a tropical African and Asian tree, Adenanthera pavonina, of the legume family, having feathery foliage and bearing red seeds that are used in beadwork.
  • bare ownership — ownership of a piece of property without the right to use and derive profit from that property
  • bark chippings — small pieces of tree bark used chiefly for pathways in gardens or woodland
  • beyond dispute — not open to dispute or question; settled
  • biceps brachii — See under biceps.
  • biceps femoris — See under biceps.
  • bicuspid valve — mitral valve
  • bioprospecting — searching for plant or animal species for use as a source of commercially exploitable products, such as medicinal drugs
  • bipartisanship — representing, characterized by, or including members from two parties or factions: Government leaders hope to achieve a bipartisan foreign policy.
  • bipolarisation — the act of bipolarising
  • bishop's mitre — a European heteropterous bug, Aelia acuminata, whose larvae are a pest of cereal grasses: family Pentatomidae
  • 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.
  • bisphosphonate — any drug of a class that inhibits the resorption of bone; used in treating certain bone disorders, esp osteoporosis
  • 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 skipjack — a small spotted tuna, Euthynnus yaito, of Indo-Pacific seas
  • blacktip shark — a widely distributed sand shark, Charcharinus limbatus, having fins that appear to have been dipped in ink, inhabiting shallow waters of warm seas.
  • blind stamping — an impression on a book cover without using colour or gold leaf
  • blister copper — an impure form of copper having a blister-like surface due to the release of gas during cooling
  • blister-packed — presented in a blister pack
  • block capitals — Block capitals are simple capital letters that are not decorated in any way.
  • block sampling — the selection of a corpus for statistical literary analysis by random selection of a starting point and consideration of the continuous passage following it
  • blood spinning — a medical treatment, a use for which is the healing of sports-related injuries, that involves removing the platelet cells from the patient’s blood sample then injecting them into the injured area in order to speed recovery
  • bomb explosion — an explosion caused by the detonation of a bomb
  • border dispute — a disagreement between countries about where the border between them should be drawn
  • bottomless pit — If you describe a supply of something as bottomless, you mean that it seems so large that it will never run out.
  • bouillon spoon — a spoon with a round bowl, smaller than a soup spoon.
  • bowstring hemp — a hemplike fibre obtained from the sansevieria
  • breast implant — an object such as a sachet filled with gel introduced surgically into a woman's breast to enlarge it
  • bridge passage — bridge1 (def 7).
  • british empire — (formerly) the United Kingdom and the territories under its control, which reached its greatest extent at the end of World War I when it embraced over a quarter of the world's population and more than a quarter of the world's land surface
  • britney spears — beers
  • bronchospastic — of or relating to bronchospasms
  • brood parasite — a young bird hatched and reared by birds of a different species as a result of brood parasitism.
  • brownie points — a credit toward advancement or good standing gained especially by currying favor.
  • bumper sticker — A bumper sticker is a small piece of paper or plastic with words or pictures on it, designed for sticking onto the back of your car. It usually has a political, religious, or humorous message.
  • bursting point — the point at which normal capacity is exceeded.
  • business reply — a form of mail, as a postcard, letter, or envelope, usually sent as an enclosure, and which can be mailed back by respondents without their having to pay postage.
  • businesspeople — a person regularly employed in business, especially a white-collar worker, executive, or owner.
  • businessperson — Businesspeople are people who work in business.
  • caller display — a facility which shows the number of an incoming call
  • cambridge lisp — A flavour of Lisp using BCPL. Sources owned by Fitznorman partners.
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