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19-letter words containing t, i, p, e

  • backward compatible — backward compatibility
  • bacteriochlorophyll — a pale blue-gray form of chlorophyll that is unique to the photosynthetic but anaerobic purple bacteria.
  • bankruptcy petition — an official request for protection under bankruptcy laws, which initiates bankruptcy proceedings
  • barometric pressure — atmospheric pressure as indicated by a barometer
  • be burnt to a crisp — If something is burnt to a crisp, it is completely burnt.
  • beauty preparations — the cosmetics, creams etc used to improve someone's beauty
  • benefit performance — a theatrical or musical performance in aid of charity
  • binomial experiment — an experiment consisting of a fixed number of independent trials each with two possible outcomes, success and failure, and the same probability of success. The probability of a given number of successes is described by a binominal distribution
  • bit-paired keyboard — (hardware)   (Obsolete, or "bit-shift keyboard") A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed. In order to avoid making the thing more of a Rube Goldberg kluge than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the same basic bit pattern on one key. Looking at the ASCII chart, we find: high low bits bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 010 ! " # $ % & ' ( ) 011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). This was *not* the weirdest variant of the QWERTY layout widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029 card punches. When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, there was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product look like an office typewriter. These alternatives became known as "bit-paired" and "typewriter-paired" keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical - and because most hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was little pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter standard. The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The "typewriter-paired" standard became universal, "bit-paired" hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse.
  • blue-ringed octopus — a highly venomous octopus, Octopus maculosus, of E Australia which exhibits blue bands on its tentacles when disturbed
  • box-office receipts — the money earned from ticket sales for a film or play
  • breathing apparatus — an apparatus, usually consisting of tanks of air or oxygen and a mouthpiece, that enables the wearer to breath in difficult conditions such as a smoke-filled building
  • brightline spectrum — the spectrum of an incandescent substance appearing on a spectrogram as one or more bright lines against a dark background.
  • bring into the open — to make evident or public
  • brush-tailed possum — any of several widely-distributed Australian possums of the genus Trichosurus
  • calculate a premium — If you calculate a premium, you decide how much a policyholder has to pay for insurance cover.
  • canterbury pilgrims — the pilgrims whose stories are told in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
  • capacitive coupling — the connection of two or more circuits by means of a capacitor.
  • capacity attendance — a situation when a venue for an event is as full as it can be
  • cape-disappointment — Cape, a cape in SW Washington state, projecting into the Pacific Ocean on the N of the mouth of the Columbia River.
  • capital expenditure — expenditure on acquisitions of or improvements to fixed assets
  • captains courageous — a novel (1897) by Rudyard Kipling.
  • carbon steel piping — Carbon steel piping is pipes made of steel with carbon as the main alloying component, used for transporting fluids.
  • caterpillar tractor — a tractor powered by a Caterpillar track
  • cathodic protection — a technique for protecting metal structures, such as steel ships and pipelines, from electrolytic corrosion by making the structure the cathode in a cell, either by applying an electromotive force directly or by putting it into contact with a more electropositive metal
  • chain-reacting pile — nuclear reactor
  • chamber of deputies — the lower house of the legislature of certain countries, as Italy.
  • champagne lifestyle — a lifestyle involving the enjoyment of luxuries and expensive pleasures
  • champagne socialist — a professed socialist who enjoys an extravagant lifestyle
  • chemolithoautotroph — (biology) A chemoautotroph or lithoautotroph.
  • chief petty officer — the senior naval rank for personnel without commissioned or warrant rank
  • chinese finger trap — a child's toy, consisting of a small cylinder of woven straw or paper into which the forefingers are placed, one in each end: the harder one pulls, the more securely the fingers are held.
  • christmas pantomime — pantomime (def 5).
  • cinematographically — a motion-picture projector.
  • columnar epithelium — epithelium consisting of one or more layers of elongated cells of cylindrical or prismatic shape.
  • combination therapy — a therapy that combines two or more drugs, or two or more treatments
  • command interpreter — (operating system)   A program which reads textual commands from the user or from a file and executes them. Some commands may be executed directly within the interpreter itself (e.g. setting variables or control constructs), others may cause it to load and execute other files. When an IBM PC is booted BIOS loads and runs the MS-DOS command interpreter into memory from file COMMAND.COM found on a floppy disk or hard disk drive. The commands that COMMAND.COM recognizes (e.g. COPY, DIR, PRN) are called internal commands, in contrast to external commands which are executable files.
  • command line option — (software)   (Or "option", "flag", "switch", "option switch") An argument to a command that modifies its function rather than providing data. Options generally start with "-" in Unix or "/" in MS-DOS. This is usually followed by a single letter or occasionally a digit. More recently, GNU software adopted the --longoptionname style, usually in addition to traditional, single-character, -x style equivalents. Some commands require each option to be a separate argument, introduced by a new "-" or "/", others allow multiple option letters to be concatenated into a single argument with a single "-" or "/", e.g. "ls -al". A few Unix commands (e.g. ar, tar) allow the "-" to be omitted. Some options may or must be followed by a value, e.g. "cc prog.c -o prog", sometimes with and sometimes without an intervening space.
  • community policeman — a police officer assigned to a particular area
  • community programme — (in Britain) a former government scheme to provide temporary work for people unemployed for over a year
  • compact disc player — a machine for playing compact discs
  • compact disc writer — (storage)   (CD burner) A device that can write data to Compact Disc Recordable (CD-R) or Compact Disc Rewritable (CD-RW) discs. Now both these CD formats are often combined with a DVD writer.
  • compact disk player — a device for playing compact disks.
  • compassionate leave — Compassionate leave is time away from your work that your employer allows you for personal reasons, especially when a member of your family dies or is seriously ill.
  • competitive bidding — a system by which a contract is awarded to the lowest bidder
  • complement fixation — the fixing of complement into the product of an antigen-antibody reaction: used as an infection indicator in certain serologic tests that measure the presence or absence of free, active complement
  • complete fertilizer — a fertilizer containing nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, the three principal elements required for plant nutrition.
  • complexity analysis — In sructured program design, a quality-control operation that counts the number of "compares" in the logic implementing a function; a value of less than 10 is considered acceptable.
  • complimentary close — the part of a letter that by convention immediately precedes the signature, as “Very truly yours,” “Cordially,” or “Sincerely yours.”.
  • compromise solution — a solution to a problem reached by compromise
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